


Chains of Babylon

by poisontaster



Series: Heart 'Verse [12]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Amnesia, Amnesiac Dean, Evil Asylums, Horror, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Medical Torture, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-22
Updated: 2006-08-22
Packaged: 2018-05-13 23:58:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 42,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5721952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean doesn't remember anything from before the hospital, but if this guy wants to break him out, help him escape, because he thinks Dean's someone he knows...?  Well, Dean's just going to go with it. Takes place in Year Four.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Dam Would Break

**Author's Note:**

> _is it this place that makes me fall from you_  
>  forget the words that once rang so true  
> did we expect that life was ever fair, my God...  
> I sowed a field of rose and reaped a whipping rod  
> and everything I've held too tight inside  
> could make a part of me die  
> and if my lips could only speak the name  
> the dam would break
> 
>  
> 
> "The Dam Would Break" by Toad the Wet Sprocket

"Dean?"

That's his name. He knows it's his name because they tell him so. 

_It's your medication, Dean. Make sure to take all of them. Show us your tongue, Dean—don't want any cheating, do we? No, Dean, don't be silly, there's no such thing as ghosts._

He opens his eyes.

He doesn't know the boy leaning over him. It's dark in the room, which makes details hard to figure out, but in the faint crisscrossed glow of light from the viewing panel in the door (there are no windows here), he can see the boy is tall, dark-haired and dressed in street clothes. So…not a doctor, then. And with that much hair, not a patient. He smells like the outside. He smells like snow.

"Dean?" The quality, the tone of the voice changes as Dean's visitor notices Dean's eyes are open. He's gotten good at tone; you have to be to try and anticipate the appropriate reactions. This is _relief_ , it's _fear_ and he knows them from his own voice, not the doctors'.

The boy's hands are on the buckles of the gag, undoing them with frantic and clumsy haste. "Dean, they told me… They told me you were dead." 

Even disoriented and still sort of lethargic, Dean makes a noise of protest from behind the plastic lozenge that holds his tongue down and shakes his head. He rattles the restraints that hold him to the bed instead. For God's sake…

_Do not take the Lord's name in vain, Dean._

For Pete's sake, the gag is something that can be dealt with _later_. The boy's breath catches in something like a sob and he mutters, "Yeah," in a quavering, cracked voice, moving to the restraint cuffs instead. His breath seems very loud in the stillness. But he's doing it. He's unstrapping Dean.

Dean brings his head up as far as he can and watches the crosshatched white-lit rectangle inset into the door. There are no clocks in the rooms, no way to measure the passage of time (which he thinks would only contribute to his insanity instead of helping it…but he's not a doctor, what does he know?) and so he doesn't know when it is in the guards' rotation or when the bulked up shadow of Rube or Hank or Feisal might cross the way.

Finally, the boy gets one of Dean's arms free. Dean immediately lunges sideways to work on the restraint on the other arm while the boy goes to work on the cuffs around Dean's ankles. The slightly cold air bites into the friction burns on his skin but he ignores the discomfort. It's certainly the least of his problems. 

Once Dean's loose, he jumps off the bed and goes to the door, absently working on the gag buckles again. The hall looks empty. Dean is just starting to wonder how the boy got in here—and whether this is yet another of his hallucinations—when the boy touches his arm. When Dean turns his head, flinching back from even that light touch, the boy cocks his head at the vent shaft, whose grille now hangs loose and lopsided, showing the lightless maw beyond. "C'mon", he says. "Let's get out of here."

 _Yes,_ he thinks. _Let's._ If Dean believed in God, he'd sure as hell… He'd sure pray to Him now. 

The shaft is a _very_ tight squeeze; Dean's shoulders practically rub the thin metal on either side and he keeps bumping his head, trying to see where he's going. They're about thirty feet in when the impact of it—enclosed space—hits him.

"Dean?" the boy says questioningly from behind him when Dean stops. Dean can't breathe, all his crazy jagged thoughts bouncing and rebounding from the sides of the shaft to strike back at him like little daggers and leave wounds that do not bleed. Now his breath sounds too loud, hoarse and gasping, and yet there's no oxygen in it, no oxygen in his lungs. His fingernails dig into the metal beneath him with a horrible screech and he lets his head fall in between his outstretched forearms wondering if this is how it feels just before your heart explodes in your chest. The burns on his chest, his scalp throb to that same erratic rhythm.

_You need help, Dean. You're a very sick young man. We're only here to help you. You know that, right?_

"Dean, man, don't stop," the boy says, urgent whispers that Dean hears without really understanding. "You've gotta keep going. They're going to notice you're gone."

Dean's eyes flinch tighter at the thought of that, at the thought of what they'll do to him if they catch him trying to escape again. 

_It's only for your own good, Dean. You do understand that? We don't want to do this to you. It's not enjoyable. We don't enjoy this. So don't force us to do these things. Because we only want what's best for you._

The metal shaft rattles and for an instant Dean wonders if it's an earthquake. Then he realizes it's him, trembling and shaking.

"Hey," The boy says and one of his hands encircles Dean's ankle warmly, just below the abraded part. "Hey, it's okay, Dean. I'm here now. I'm going to get you out of here."

 _I should stay,_ Dean thinks. _I should go back. Dr. Valeri is right; I'm not well._

He thinks of her, tiny and somehow crisp, smelling of cinnamon. She always looks so kind, even when they put him into the tubs of barely-melted ice and shove his head under or strap him down for the electroshock. She always looks so sad, that he makes her do this, by his stubborn refusal to get well. It's always her careful hands on the syringes, deft as she sinks them into his veins. 

_Why would you want to escape, Dean? Don't you know everything you want—everything you need to get well—is right here?_

"Dean!" The boy calls up to him a third time, louder and more urgent. His thumb rubs against the bone of Dean's ankle and something about that touch, light and almost thoughtless, makes the quivering inside him lie down and be still, receding far enough that he can think and move again.

With the presence and heat of the boy a distraction and obscure comfort behind him, Dean takes a deep breath and crawls forward again.

***

There's a car waiting, almost invisible against the night. It looks dangerous and tough, nothing like he would expect the boy to drive. The boy looks too soft for this car, Dean thinks, opening the passenger side door and slithering in. He wraps his arms around his shoulders, shivering with reaction and cold. He can barely feel his numbed feet after the run barefoot through the snow and his flimsy scrubs are no match for the bite of the wind. He's sitting there for a minute or more before he realizes the boy hasn't joined him. Dean looks up. The boy stands outside the car looking confused and hurt. Their gazes meet and before Dean can ask, the boy turns on one heel and goes around to the driver's side.

Dean thinks he might have to revise his opinion of how harmless the boy is when he pulls a gun from the back of his pants. Dean makes no noise—he's learned his lessons well—but he flattens himself back against the door feeling his eyes get wide and scared. They like the fear, the doctors; they like to see it in your eyes, to show that you're properly repentant for your bad behavior. Not too fast, because that shows that you're not sincere, but Dean's learned that his day's 'therapy' doesn't end until he lets that fear—the fear that colors his every waking moment anyway—bloom on his face like a blush. But this time, the fear is nothing less than genuine.

Maybe this is another trick. Maybe another test. To see if he's sincere. To see if he's _trying_. Dr. Valeri will be…not pleased.

"I have to go back," he says, and fumbles for the door handle as the boy puts the gun on the seat between them and sticks the key in the ignition.

"Dean." The boy leans across—not that great a stretch at his height—and knocks Dean's hands away from the handle. "Jesus, don't be silly. You're not going back in there." He glances out the windshield, a worried look furrowed into his face. "Anybody…anybody you left behind…we can come back for them later, okay?"

Dean shakes his head. "I didn't leave anybody," he says, eyeing the gun and wondering if it's worth it to grab for it. If it's a test, it's probably unloaded anyway. Probably. He's heard things. It's hard to tell what's just the rambling of the other crazies like himself and what's reliable. Maybe none of it is. "I just…Dr. Valeri will be worried about me."

The boy snorts, throwing the car in gear. "Let her fucking worry," he says and starts backing up and then coming around to ease out of the clearing where the car is hidden. "Soon as the car warms up, I'll get some heat on. When we get further, I'll get your stuff out of the trunk."

"My stuff?"

The boy drives, raising his chin to check the rear view every couple hundred feet. "Well, not whatever you had when you went in there obviously, but all the things that were back at the motel and stuff, yeah. So I hope that wasn’t your favorite pair of underwear or anything. Oh!" He fishes in his pocket and pulls out what looks like a handful of leather cord. "I did get this back, though. Or that son-of-a-bitch sheriff gave it to me, when he showed me your so-called corpse."

Dean accepts the scrap from the kid's hand and wonders about the edge in his voice, like it's shaking under the surface. "Motel?" Tied to the thong is a pendant, sort of like a crayfish or a scorpion or something. It's sort of too stylized to tell. He turns it over in his fingers. He wonders if he wore it a lot. If the pendant means anything to him or to the boy. Maybe it was a present.

The boy glances at him, only readable from the movement of his head. Dean tugs it over his head and lets it fall onto his chest. He doesn't feel any better or worse at the touch of it; he feels a little silly for expecting otherwise. 

Dean wishes there were lights on this long stretch of empty road; he hasn't had a good look at the boy yet and he thinks he'd like to. It might explain why he's taking this enormous risk…though he's not sure how it would do that, exactly. "Dean— Are you okay?"

Dean pulls his feet up on the seat, huddling into his raised knees. Everything's thawing just enough to start hurting and the oily-acid taste is in the back of his throat, the one that he knows signals his need for another dose of his meds. He wonders what kind of problem that's going to be; if the hallucinations and nightmares will start up right away again or whether there'll be a kind of grace period while the drugs work out of him. "Yeah, I'm fine," he says, trying to keep it casual. He'd like to avoid this conversation until there's at least a few more miles between them and the hospital.

He hadn't really thought this whole thing out, sort of caught up in the whole idea of _escape_. It wasn't until the gun that he realized going off into the unknown with a stranger might not be a good idea. It's not until now, realizing—too late, smart one, Dean—this kid thinks he _knows_ Dean that he thinks maybe he should have gotten a little more information up front.

"Because you don't seem like yourself."

 _You're not yourself, Dean. This isn't you, this…hunter who chases down ghosts and monsters. That's the fantasy talking. Can't you hear how silly that sounds? No. You're a good boy from a loving family that's just gotten a little turned around and we're here to help you with that._

"What…?" God… 

_…the Lord's name, Dean…_

Man, if this is a test, he's so fucked. So very very fucked. Still… "What does myself seem like?" he asks.

He's thrown sideways as the boy jerks the wheel right, driving the car onto the graveled shoulder. The little rocks pop and crack against the car's undercarriage, muted by the swish of snow and dead grass. Dean huddles back a few more centimeters against the door, wondering if he could get out the door before the boy really hurts him. This was stupid. This was…this was _crazy_.

"Dean…this isn't fucking funny. What the fuck is going on?"

Dean sighs. "I don't know. I don't know what you mean. All this stuff…" He waves a hand at the pendant, the car. The jig's up now. If it's a test, he might as well throw himself on the mercy of the court or whatever and if not…well, maybe he and this kid can work out some kind of deal. Dean doesn't have much to trade, but according to the doctors, that's never stopped him before. Sort of known for it, really. Slutty Dean. Easy Dean. Dean of the Perverted and Lost. "Look, I don't even know who you are. I mean, sorry for lying to you and all but I just… I had to get out of there."

The boy just stares.

"Really. If you knew what it was like in there…" Dean's stomach clenches and suddenly the bitter medicine taste is stabbing him, hurting him, so thick he wants to spit. "Doesn't matter. I…I can get out here. It's not a problem…"

The boy just _stares_.

"Or…if you want… I mean. We could work something out, you know?"

_Really, Dean, given the uses you've put it to, you're lucky it hasn't rotted off. A little pain should be nothing. Now. Again, Dean. Scrub it again. We want all of you clean, don't we?_

And really, that staring thing is just getting creepy now.

"O-kay," Dean says when the silence has stretched out too long and far and the boy's still staring. He's not looking forward to walking barefoot in his scrubs in the cold, but away from the hospital is away from the hospital. By any means necessary, as the man said. He unclips the seatbelt and reaches for the door handle a second time. Again the boy leans over and slaps Dean's hand away.

"Don't be stupid, Dean," he growls. "Put your seatbelt back on." He throws the car into gear with jerky, angry motions and peels out. The rear of the car slips and slithers sideways as the wheels slide on the twin slicks of gravel and snow.

Dean's got misgivings—the gun _is_ still on the seat between them—but not as bad as the prospect of going back to the hospital. He's tried to escape three times since waking up as a patient in the hospital; the results had been…less than pleasant. He might be insane, but he's not so crazy as to want to go through any of that again.

_This is the sensory deprivation chamber, Dean. The patients here rather amusingly and colloquially call it 'The Coffin'. We find, however, that it's actually a rather instructive method of clarifying the mind._

"So…do we know each other?" he asks finally, after several more miles and tense ugly minutes of silence. The boy's grip on the car's steering wheel is white-knuckled and Dean can practically hear his teeth grind. Even the engine's rumble sounds rough and irritated. "You got a n—"

"Sam." The boy snaps the name out, crackling with tension. "I'm Sam. Winchester. Your brother."

"Oh." He's actually sort of disappointed. Dr. Valeri had been exhaustive in cataloguing his perversions and dude's sort of hot. Dean had thought maybe he was a boyfriend or something but he supposes it's not too cool to think like that if it's your brother, insane or not.

He leans forward and flips the heat on. He's just warm enough to shiver in earnest, his teeth chattering noisily and he can't stop shaking. The hems of his scrubs are wet with snow melt and he's covered in goose bumps, his skin almost fuchsia with cold.

The silence is really starting to get to him, though; he'd almost take the loonies on the ward's screaming/muttering/crying over the boy's—Sam's—furious quiet. Tentatively, Dean reaches forward and turns the radio on too. There's a cassette in the deck. Music—something with loud blaring guitars and heavy drums like an earthquake— _explodes_ from the speakers, making him flinch.

Sam gives him a sidelong look and snaps it off with a curt gesture.

"Sorry," Dean says hastily, tucking back tighter to the door again. "Sorry."

The kid sighs. "You don't have to be sorry, Dean. Unless it's for inflicting this sort of music on me in the first place."

Dean blinks. That's _his_ music?

 _You're so_ angry, _Dean. Why are you so angry? Don't you understand that we—your doctors—have nothing but your best interests at heart? Everything that's happened to you here, the_ reason _you're here is because of that anger? If you would just let us help you, Dean. Let us help you get well._

"So…where are we going?" After all Dr. Valeri's talk about his—their?—parents, he can't imagine they'll be too welcome at home, wherever that is, and he didn't escape just to get narced on and turned in by his own family. He wonders if Sam's thought of that. He wonders if this, this wild, haphazard escape, is why Dr. Valeri's never mentioned a brother before. But if Sam's also deranged, how did only one of them end up in the hospital?

Sam glances in the rearview reflexively, then at him. "Well, my plan _was_ to just get the hell out of town," he says. _Good plan,_ Dean thinks approvingly. "But that was before I knew…" Another sideways look and Sam's jaw tightens. He takes one hand off the wheel and reaches like he wants to touch and then slowly puts it back, fingers curling tight again. "Are you okay?"

Dean shrugs, discomfited by the question, by the concern underneath the bristly anger. He looks down at his bare toes, wiggling back to life on the seat. He doesn't think about what he must look like, what the other patients in the ward—his psychotic reflections—had looked like. "Sure."

"Dean—" The tone of the boy's voice, even so sharply cut off, makes it sound like he knows Dean; at least, Dr. Valeri sounds much the same when he's been especially defiant or uncooperative.

 _It will only hurt for a minute, Dean. It may seem like the longest minute of your young life, but hold on to the knowledge that it is only a minute. Sixty simple seconds and then everything will seem so much clearer. Remember—we're only doing this to help_ you _get well._

He eyes the gun again, nervously, but Sam seems to have forgotten it's there, or at least has other things on his mind.

 _Yeah, like how his sick fu… freak brother turned into his brain damaged sick freak brother,_ Dean thinks ruefully. His big toe has a black and blotchy bruise under the nail where Hank stepped on him with his heavy boots the last time Dean gave him lip. The nail will probably fall off soon.

"Seriously, man…are you okay?"

And what's he going to say to that? Dean shrugs a second time. "Other than I can't remember jack before the hospital, yeah, I'm seriously fine." He's got some burns and bruises and assorted aches that might make a case otherwise, but he figures they'll heal. "I… Do Mom and Dad know you came after me like this?"

Sam _stands up_ on the brake this time and Dean's suddenly very glad he put his seatbelt on, because it's about the only thing that keeps him from pitching through the windshield, a hot band of pain right across his chest and neck. Dean's flung out hands slap into the dashboard and pain radiates up his bones into his formerly dislocated shoulder.

"Jesus," Sam says, staring out the window and still gripping the wheel like his life depends on it. _"Jesus."_

"You shouldn't take the Lord's name…" Dean can't stop himself. He literally has to clap his hand over his mouth to quit parroting Dr. Valeri's words back to this Sam kid. Sam's head sort of whips around and for a minute they just stare at each other.

Then, softly—almost too softly for Dean to make out—he says something that sounds a lot like, "Kreesto."

Dean raises his eyebrows, confused.

Sam sighs again, slumping back against the seat. "I should have known it wouldn't be that easy." He rakes a hand through his hair. "No, Dean, M…mom and Dad do not know where we are. Shit. _Shit._ We need some place to hole up. This is all wrong."


	2. Close Up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Oh my God,  
>  I'm not supposed to say this  
> 'Cause I know that you're trouble but...  
> Is that your real name and why are you doing this?  
> And how did I get here?  
> Okay. No more questions,  
> No worries  
> It's destination unknown  
> So dive in  
> The waters great  
> Listen I'm starting to speak like you_  
> "Close Up" by Frou Frou

Sam gets out of the car first and goes to the trunk, pulling out a blue overcoat with plaid lining and a pair of shoes that are really obviously not Dean's. "Here," he says, coming around to Dean's side. "The shoes aren't going to fit—or keep your feet very warm—but it's the best we've got at the moment. I kept telling you, you needed a spare pair. These should help a bit." He produces a roll of thick socks from his jacket pocket and hands those to Dean too.

Dean nods, unrolls the socks and starts to fumble them on his feet. "Where are we?" he asks, tipping his head towards the dilapidated cabin on the other side of the car. 

Sam shrugs, alternating between staring at Dean and watching the road—and Dean uses that word generously—they'd slipped and slid their way up. "Some old cabin. It looked like nobody'd been up here in years when we came up the first time. It should be safe enough, for a little while. Especially if I go back and erase the Impala's tracks."

"We were up here before?" Even though he's shivering again— _put on the coat, stupid_ —Dean takes a minute to crane over his shoulder and look at the cabin again. Not that it looks any different or more familiar on second perusal. Which…is weird, right? If he's from Asher's Grove, you'd think he'd recognize the surrounding foothills or something. But it's all strange, all new. "When was that?"

He looks up at Sam. It's not any easier to make out Sam's expression than it was in the hospital, in the shabby illumination of the dome light, but what he can see makes Dean shiver a little bit. Dr. Valeri looks at him sometimes like that. Sort of…hungry. And that never means anything good. Then the corner of Sam's mouth squares and quirks and he just looks sad. "'Bout a month ago, little more."

"Oh." Dean slips his feet into the shoes—which must be Sam's—and shrugs into the coat. "What for?"

Sam shrugs again. "Part of the job."

"And what job's that?"

"Hmm." Sam grimaces and rubs the back of his neck thoughtfully. "Well. That's where it gets more complicated."

***

"You're not serious," Dean says. He doesn't mean it to come out so edgy or emphatic—he _is_ still the unarmed one here, as well as being a few inches shorter than the kid—Sam. But after everything he's been through, this…?

Sam sighs. "Yes, I'm serious."

"Ghosts," Dean repeats. He runs a hand over his shaven scalp, feeling the roughness where the electrode burns are lightly scabbed over. His breath smokes in the cold; Sam has forbidden more than a fist-sized fire that's barely knocked the chill off the room and there's no electricity or gas or whatever to run the boiler. Dressed in some clothes Sam pulled out of one of the duffels from the trunk, he huddles as close to the fire as he can get without actually being _in_ the fireplace and shivers to himself.

"Mostly ghosts," Sam says. "Sometimes other things. You really don't remember any of this?"

Dean can't help the shudder that runs through him at the question. He remembers plenty. He remembers more than enough, even if his memory _is_ Swiss cheese. He remembers that ice burns when pressed up against naked skin. He remembers the feel of too many hands holding him down, forcing things into him—needles, drugs, things he doesn't want to even think about. He remembers their eyes. He remembers the screaming, not just his.

Oh yes, he remembers plenty.

"No," he answers, though, because he knows none of that is what Sam means. "I just… I just remember the hospital. Everything before that is a blank."

As grateful as he is to have been rescued, to be free, he's conscious of a bitter tang of disappointment too. The hot guy turns out to be his brother, and thus, not hot—though he's having a hard time convincing himself of that part. He also turns out to be as delusional as Dean and while it's one thing to be a nutball yourself, it sucks just a bit to find your so-called rescuer is too. Your heavily armed rescuer. The one that keeps staring at you like you're a ghost yourself…which, okay, Dean supposes that part isn't unreasonable if someone told him Dean was dead. But that raises the uncomfortable question of why anyone would do that. Someone had to have wanted to keep them apart pretty bad. 

Dean has so many questions. He doesn't even know where to start.

"So…this whole ghost hunting thing? How long have we been doing that?"

Sam shrugs. "Forever?" His laugh is sharp-edged. "My whole life, anyway. Most of yours. It was…" He looks at Dean and there's something razor-like in his eyes as well, something that both cuts and bleeds. His hands are restless, picking at his jeans, his shirt, the nap of the broke down couch; fingers twist and curl over each other, tearing at the nails, the cuticles. "It's our thing. The family business. Dad was in the Marines, before. He taught us."

"And he believes in all this…stuff too? Ghosts? Seriously. Ghosts?"

Sam nods. "And other things." While rummaging around in the luggage, Sam had brought out a large leather-bound journal, bristling with papers. Sam picks it up and his thumbs slide over its cover gently, reverent. "This is Dad's. Well, it's ours now. But it's got everything we ever hunted. Everything we ever killed. Ghosts and weres and vampires; skinwalkers and demons." He holds it out and Dean takes it reluctantly, feeling half-afraid that some taint, some further spiral of madness will infect him through its pages.

There are newspaper articles pasted to the pages and shoved in between; pictures and drawings and notes in three different hands. Dean stares at the pages without seeing any of the words before he lifts his eyes to Sam's. "Do…do you have a pen?"

Sam wordlessly hands one over and Dean copies out one of the lines, _…use specially blessed buckshot. Ratio for iron to salt and silver is…_

The handwriting is the same, although his is a little shakier. He doesn't know why it bothers him so much; he knows his sins. 

_You have to stop this, Dean. You have to stop! Look at this. Look, dammit, or I'll have your eyes propped open. This is you, Dean. From when you were admitted. Look at you. Ranting. Practically frothing. Do you see? Do you hear yourself? Demons, ghosts, monsters… It's not real. You know it's not real, right? Have you_ seen _a single…supernatural thing since you came here? No. And you know why? Because they're not_ real.

Clumsy, Dean shoves the diary back at Sam and lurches to his feet, hands tucked into his armpits for warmth as he paces back and forth in short jerky bursts.

"Dean?"

"Why?" he asks. "Why are we like this? Why am I?" He turns back to Sam, feeling like he's pleading for…something. "You should have left me there, at the hospital," he says finally, bitterly. 

"Dean—" Sam gets up. He takes a step towards Dean and Dean takes a step backwards without really being aware of doing it.

"This is _insane_. I mean, _clearly_ ," Dean says. His throat aches and he wonders what to do. What he can do. Maybe he should have stayed where he was; maybe he truly earned all the things they did to him there, stuck below a threshold of sanity and completely unable to recognize it. But the thought of going back is…okay, there _is_ no thought of going back. Which he thinks should argue for his sanity, but apparently not. In any case, he sure isn't sure he has any business out on the street, free to do…whatever.

_Look, Dean. Look at how you hurt Rube, Feisal. They're trained men and used to this. It's their job. Now imagine what kind of damage you did, out there in the world. You're dangerous, Dean; like a little wild dog. You're dangerous to yourself—just look at all these scars—and you're a danger to others. It's the best thing for everybody that you're here, before you killed someone, or killed yourself._

He turns back to Sam. "We don't…we don't hurt people, right?"

Sam makes a sarcastic face. "Well, unless you count credit card fraud as _hurting_ …" Dean doesn't know what he looks like, but Sam looks stricken at whatever he sees in Dean's face and reaches for him. Dean backs up again, almost trips over the old and moth eaten footstool. "No, Dean. We don't hurt people. Just things. Things that aren't human anymore or never were."

Dean's stomach is churning. It's been about six hours since his last dose. His skin is tingling, like millions of little ants waking up and crawling just under the surface; edges seem too sharp, colors a bit too intense. He wonders if he's going to puke. He did last time.

"Dean." Sam's voice, softened and gentled, makes Dean look up and over at him. He realizes he's standing half-hunched, arms wrapped tight over his ribs. It hurts in the shoulder that always aches. "What did they do to you?" Sam asks and Dean shudders. 

"Nothing," he says and his voice cracks like brittle and dusty glass.

"Liar." Sam's voice is still gentle, but there's a note underneath it. It reminds him of Dr. Valeri, dangerous beneath the surface, and for all that Sam saved him from the hospital, he's reminded he really doesn't know a damn thing about this kid or his reasons for doing what he's done. "Those are electrode burns on your head, Dean. I assume that's from some kind of electroshock… I've seen the bruises on your wrists and ankles…what else? How…?" His mouth and jaw flex, somehow terrible like watching an earthquake. Not that Dean has any distinct memories of that either. "I'm not going to hurt you, Dean. I just…" His hands tuck hard into his armpits, thumbs jutting up. "I just want to help you. Help you remember, help you get well…whatever."

"I'm fine," Dean lies, suppressing the urge to run his hand over his scalp and hide the circular burn marks.

Sam's mouth opens and closes. Then he turns away, towards the pile of duffle bags he brought in from the car. He hunkers down and starts sorting through them. "We have arnica cream," he says. "That will help with the bruises, the pain and swelling. If…if the sores on your head are scabbed over, it should help with them too. And we've got painkillers…the supply's a little low, but it should get you by. Darvocet, Percocet, Vicodin…"

"I'm fine," Dean repeats. It comes out sharper than before and he flinches in reflex, expecting to be hit, hurt, tied down, drugged.

His back is to Dean, but Sam's shoulders sag and his head falls, elbows resting on his knees. "Just try the arnica," he says finally, softly. "It's a salve. You can just…rub it on. Please."

Dean wipes the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket and plops down on the footstool before he falls down. "Yeah," he says dully. "Okay. Whatever."

Sam tosses him the jar and Dean fields it one handed. The cream inside is white and smells like honey. He dabs his fingers in it and massages it into his skin. The flesh around his wrists is a mess of old and new bruises, scrapes that have become sores, sores on their way to becoming scars. He has scars all over his body, great and small, and he doesn't remember what any of them mean. He doesn't remember what any of this means.

Dean doesn't realize he's said the thought aloud until Sam says, "I can tell you. If you want."

Dean looks up. Sam's facing him again, on one knee with the other curled beneath him. He doesn't look anything like the face Dean sees reflected in windows and smeary metal siding. His hair is darker and so are his eyes. He's taller, lankier. Dean opens his mouth to say something, answer, and his gorge suddenly rises. He pukes all over his own feet, his whole body numb and buzzing. A second later, he tips sideways as the jar of arnica cream drops out of his nerveless hands. He hits the floor and it doesn't even hurt. Not like the rest of him hurts.

"Dean!" Sam's scrambling up, across the floor to him. The low grade residual ache in Dean's head blows up, piercing his brain like shrapnel. Dean digs his fingers into his scalp and whimper-screams, rocking and wanting to throw up again, wanting to keep throwing up until he's rid of it, it, it, whatever _it_ is, skittering and slinking around inside of him.

Sam's arms go around him, hauling him up by his armpits, getting one arm around Dean's chest like an iron band—man, he's really strong—and ducking his head under Dean's shoulder. Dean coughs and shudders, feeling boneless and weak, unable to help much as Sam half-drags him into the bedroom and throws him down on one of the ratty looking mattresses. The jolt is too much; Dean starts vomiting again. Sam curses, rolls Dean onto his side and it dribbles onto the floor, thin, weak bile that stings his gums and tongue.

_I know, Dean. This hurts, yes? Well. Let us remember this, then. Pain is necessary. Pain is instructive. We learn by our mistakes, do we not? And what do our mistakes cause us? Yes, Dean. Pain. This is not an arbitrary punishment. This is the consequence of your own actions, your own mistakes._

This is how they got him last time, cramped up and sick, only half-conscious and unable to defend himself when Blake and Heimdall decided to get a little back. He tries to grab Sam's wrist, but his fingers slide away, useless, soft. _Please,_ he thinks. _Please don't let them get me. Don't let them take me back._

Sam's hand turns, grabs onto Dean's wrist instead. Dean can _feel_ it, vivid and tangible, almost too much. He chokes on his own scream, but the silent reverberation of it rises, from his toes, from his bone and balls up his spine and into his brain where everything shatters into pieces and he can only see them in fragments.

He is…

…he is gasping. There is no breath. No air. He thinks he can feel the blood draining out of his lips, turning them cold and blue. His eyes, though, his eyes cloud with black and he falls, he fades, losing his grip on the crumbling edge before he knows whether he'll ever breathe again and he is…

…he is damp and shuddering, racked with cramp; lightning bolt and earthquake; giant hands that wring him dry and rip him apart. His bowels, his bladder empty without his control and over it all, the frantic elegy of his own voice: "…I need it. I need it, please, anything. I'll say anything. Do anything, just please. Please. It hurts. It hurts so much…" and he is…

…he is being stripped naked. These are new hands, not like the others. They are careful. Gentle. He can smell himself—too much—sweat and shit, piss and blood. He can feel it, caking his skin, hurting, burning, and he is…

…he is propped against someone's chest. Warm water, warm sponge, cold goose-pimpled skin. Cleaning. Cleansing. Wiping away the filth. Hand across his chest, holding him up, holding in his heart, too fast, too strong. And again a voice, but this time not his. "…this one in Abilene, when you fell from a mausoleum roof onto a fence… This was when a dryad stabbed you. That was in Maine, that town that was too small to even have a name ….here and here and over _here_ , fairy bites from that nest in Plover… …this was…this was the werewolf in Granite City. I thought…I thought you were going to die. …this…this was the accident. The spleen's a vestigial organ anyway, right?" and this one and this one and this and he is…

(through it all, that voice, lifeline and annoyance both— _come back dean come back_ )

…he is sleeping, hard and heavy, when he feels fingers on his face. It doesn't feel bad. It doesn't hurt and he doesn't understand why. He opens his eyes to the face of another boy lying on the opposite pillow. He can't place him, no name comes into his mind, but he feels like it's right there on the tip of his mind. "It's nothing," the boy says and he smiles. "It's fine." He doesn't know why he would believe this boy, his voice; he only knows he does. He closes his eyes and he is…

…he is alone in the dark, but not alone. Something is here with him. Can't see it, but he can feel it, like bugs crawling over his skin. It hurts, rooting in his skin, rooting in his brain, digging with greedy fingers. It hurts and he can't run; it wraps around him, python-like. Held down, held still, without even the leeway to huddle, to curl. It hurts and if he could speak, he'd beg, grovel, lick, fawn. Anything. Anything. And he is…

"Dean," a voice says. "You're Dean. You're my brother. So come back."


	3. Wicked Game

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> World was on fire, no one could save me but you.  
> Strange what desire will make foolish people do.  
> I never dreamed that I'd meet somebody like you.  
> And I never dreamed that I knew somebody like you.  
> "Wicked Game" by Chris Isaak

Dean opens his eyes.

The ceiling above him is unfamiliar, steeply pitched and wooden. Dean takes a breath, clear and unrestricted and feels oddly conscious of the in- and deflation of his lungs. He feels oddly conscious of _everything_ —the cold staleness of the air, that he's naked and warm and (for a change) unrestrained under soft blankets that smell of disuse, the ugly aching throb of his body and the sour taste on the back of his tongue and (most of all) the slight indentation of the mattress and heat that mean another body is next to him.

Remembering is slower; it usually is. This is the routine now; waiting for memory to return, wondering if it will, wondering what's gone forever. Dean flexes his unbound wrists carefully, savoring the feeling, and turns his head to look at the boy—Sam, his brother Sam—who's sitting next to him in the bed, tapping away at a laptop. "How long?" he asks. His tongue feels thick and strange.

Sam closes the laptop with a soft click. It would be easy to miss the way his hand shakes, just a little, but these kinds of details are important. "Couple days." His eyes flicker to Dean and away, too fast for Dean to tell what's in them but he looks like he hasn't slept at all. Dark stubble flecks his cheeks and upper lip. The lines around his eyes are cut deeper; the lids and underneath are colored by tiredness. Sam's shoulder moves, like he's going to make a gesture but he only puts his hand flat on the blanket, watching it like it's the most interesting thing ever. "How do you feel?"

"Fine," Dean says. He digs his heels in and sits up. He hurts. His abs ache from the vomiting and the cramps. Last time, he had the drugs to ease this part of it, the feeling of being pulped and scraped. This time there's only him in his skin. He still prefers this. Dean hesitates, then admits, "Little achy. Thirsty." 

Sam hands him a bottle of water but Dean's too weak to even screw off the top himself. Sam does it for him and hands it back, open. Dean gulps half of it in one go before Sam puts a hand on his wrist. "Don't drink too much at once," he warns. Dean nods, putting the cap back on loosely. 

"Thanks."

"Do you remember what they gave you? The drugs?"

Dean shrugs. "Nobody told me the names. Blue-green, once a day, two yellows, twice a day, a white chalky one at each meal. Little red ones five times a day. Some others that changed from day to day."

 _Of course I could tell you the names, Dean, but what are they really going to mean to you? The point is, I am your doctor and_ I _know what they are. You have to trust me, if your therapy is going to work, Dean. You trust me, don't you?_

Sam nods jerkily and Dean rolls the bottle between his hands. "From what I see, they all have some pretty…horrific side effects, even if you _need_ the drugs, which you didn't. And they're all pretty explicit about going cold turkey." He turns a little to see Dean better over the curve of his shoulder. "I think you're out of the worst of it."

Dean nods, unscrews the water bottle cap and drinks again. It sloshes around in his stomach and he becomes aware that at least some of the ache is hunger. "Is there anything to eat?"

"I don't know." Sam scratches his collarbone under the neck of his shirt absently. Again that strange unreadable flicker of his eyes. "I didn't… I didn't want to leave you."

"You haven't eaten in two _days_?" Dean fumbles the bottle and it tips out of his fingers, falling onto the floor in a messy splash. Dean jumps up and grabs the nearest piece of cloth to hand—the trailing end of his blanket—to start mopping it up. "I'm sorry," he says quickly. "I'm sorry, sorry…" Sam puts a hand on his shoulder and Dean is suddenly reminded that he's naked as he flinches without quite meaning to. "Sorry, sorry…" he babbles some more. Sometimes that helps. 

Sam only looks sad. "Dean, it's okay. It's all right, man. It's just water." He reaches down and untangles Dean's fingers from the knot of blanket, tugs him up, back onto the bed. "It's just water, Dean, come on. I don't care about that, let's get you dressed."

Dean pulls away from him. "I'm not a kid, Sam," he says, irritated. With Sam, with himself.

"No." Sam lets his breath out noisily. His hands fist in the tangle of cloth, white-knuckled and taut. "No, of course you're not. I'm sorry. I just… Do you remember anything? Anything about me or us…?"

Dean shakes his head. "I said before. All my memories start with the hospital. They told me…" His mouth twists and he looks down at his hands, resting on his naked thighs. There's a bruise on the right thigh, palm-sized; he doesn't even know how he got it. "They told me I was delusional. That I was dangerous."

"Well, they were half right," Sam says curtly. He gets up off the bed and goes over to the pile of their bags near the door. Sam must have brought them into the bedroom while Dean was out of it. He digs some clothes out of one, grabs another and slings both clothes and duffel on the mattress. "Here."

Dean grabs the jeans and shakes them out. They feel heavy, harsh, after however many weeks of scrubs. On the other hand, they feel substantial. He shrugs into the T-shirt, layers a long-sleeved shirt over it. The…amulet or pendant or whatever that Sam gave him is still around his neck, pressed to his skin by the cloth. Dean fishes it out and lets it hang, looks at it for a minute. It's not any clearer in good light, either.

Sam scoops up the laptop from the floor and takes it over to the table on the other side of the room. 

"What's in the bag?" Dean asks.

Sam sits in the chair, slowly opens up the laptop's screen. If Dean knew him better, he might think Sam was avoiding looking at him. As it is, he doesn't know. Sam could just be That Guy, like Mumbling Dave, whose eyes go everywhere except where you are. "It's your bag. Your luggage. I thought… I thought maybe if you went through it, if you looked at your stuff, maybe you would remember something."

"Oh." Dean tugs it closer. "That makes sense."

Sam nods. Dean holds for a second, looking at Sam, but Sam seems pretty intent on whatever it is he's doing. 

Okay. His luggage. _His_ luggage. These are like…his things. The clothes seem pretty standard. More of the heavy, durable jeans—nothing remarkable, although sort of disquietingly stained in places ( _not thinking about that…_ )—and cotton shirts and over shirts. The purple checked flannel gives him a little pause, but he decides to take it as a tribute to how secure he is in his masculinity. 

He finds a couple small, thin bricks of dull gray stone, a half-finished book of some kind of number puzzles and a Frankensteinian machine thingy that looked like it started its life as a Walkman. He runs his thumb across the plastic casing wondering what it does, what it's for. 

"You made that," Sam says, startling Dean so that he drops it. 

"I'm sorry," he says quickly, out of reflex, and Sam shakes his head.

"It's fine. It's…it's a tough little machine, s'been through a lot worse. There was this one time, you remember, the poltergeist in Ma…" Dean only looks at him and sheepish, Sam trails off. "Never mind. Not important. Sorry." He waves a hand and goes back to his laptop. 

Dean picks up the debauched Walkman again, turning it over in his fingers. The solder is rough against his skin. He made this? "What does it do?" He looks over at Sam, who's squinting at the screen. _He looks like he's got a headache,_ Dean thinks and wonders if that's knowledge or speculation.

Sam looks up and scrubs a hand through his hair. "It's an EMF reader. It…" Sam sighs. "We use it to find or detect ghosts."

"Oh." Dean sets it aside, vaguely disappointed. Every time he thinks he's getting somewhere, it's right back to the delusions. He wonders what happened to him, to Sam, to make them like this, mired so deep in a fantasy so obviously ridiculous.

_No, Dean, there are no such things as ghosts._

"Dean, I…"

Dean shakes his head. "No. It's all right. I just. I'm trying to figure it all out."

He didn't realize this would be so hard, that he'd gotten so used to the way things were at the hospital. Dr. Valeri, the other doctors, the nurses and orderlies—they'd done so many awful things to him, things he didn't like to think about, assuming he could even remember them as anything more than piecemeal—but they'd been familiar. He'd picked up the cues, knew how to model his behavior.

He doesn't know Sam. He doesn't know what it means when Sam rubs the bridge of his nose and forehead that way. He doesn't know if Sam's going to—at any moment—turn on him, realize that Dean isn't the man Sam thinks he is. He doesn't know how to act or what to say. What the script is.

On the other hand, Sam seems very comfortable with his many guns and knives and other things that Dean isn't sure how to classify. He looks at Dean with this sort of stricken helplessness, but the rest of the time, he just looks sort of scarily competent and while Dean's still not one hundred percent convinced he is who Sam seems to think he is, he feels the ugly and raw sense of terror ease up a little bit with Sam between him and everything else.

Which…okay, kind of shady. It makes him feel obscurely guilty that he can't remember actually _being_ this Dean that Sam seems to set so much store in. But it's not like he wouldn't remember if he could. Like he hasn't _tried_ , even before Sam.

Sam nods and Dean sees his Adam's apple bob. "Yeah, okay."

Dean sighs and goes back to sorting through 'his' things. There are some pictures. A pretty blonde woman. The back says 'Mary, 1981' in someone else's handwriting. Too old to be an ex-girlfriend, then. A man and two boys—'John, Dean and Sam, 1989'. John must be Dad, then. A slightly older boy with a rifle and a different man standing behind him, hand on the boy's shoulder. Dean recognizes the freckles and the grin as his own, but he has to flip the picture for the name of the other man, someone called 'Pastor Jim'. The date is 1992. A boy he now recognizes as himself holding an infant that must be Sam—verified by the inscription on the back. 1983. A picture of blonde Mary with John. 1978. They look happy. Must be Mom, then. There are no more recent pictures. He puts them aside. He can ask Sam about them later. His hands don't remember the rifle. He wonders if he was any good with it.

A handful of toiletries next. Electric razor in a plastic case. He runs his hand over his shorn scalp. Won't need that for a bit. He catalogues his taste in deodorant, toothpaste, shampoo—surprisingly expensive—and an alarming amount of hair product, also useless. A battered half-full box of condoms. In conjunction with the purple shirt and his sort of inappropriate reaction to Sam—which shouldn't be his fault, because _hello_ , amnesia—it seems like Dr. Valeri was right about him in this respect. Of course, he could be reading too much into all of this. 

Or, he thinks, opening the second hard-shelled case, maybe not.

Dean hefts the dildo in one hand and the half-used bottle of lube in the other. "Um," he says. "Is there something I should know?"

Sam's head turns and it seems like his whole face heats up with the glow of the blush that shows up under his skin. "Oh. That's...that's mine."

"I thought you said this is my luggage."

"It _is_. I mean. Oh, God. You like to use it on…on me."

"On you," Dean repeats tonelessly.

"We tried it on you a few times," Sam offers, burning hotter, blushing redder. His hands rub over his thighs, as if to dry them. "But you…you like the real thing better."

Dean looks down at the dildo again and his eyebrows rise up. "What…what kind of 'brothers' are we exactly?"

"Oh, God," Sam says again. His eyes look sort of wild and scared. And really, Dean can't actually blame him, all things being equal. Just the dildo by itself was pretty…interesting. "I _told_ you it was complicated."

Dean has a momentary image of what the dildo would look like going in, between Sam's legs and he shivers. Not unpleasantly. But… Dean puts the items back in the bag, burying them under the other stuff so he won't have to look at or think about them for a while. The doctors had been right. He is insane. He's apparently fucking his brother, and he's insane.

"Complicated," he echoes, still in that same dull voice. "Gotcha."

Then he stands up.

"Where are you going?" Sam asks as Dean starts to toe into his shoes. 

Dean sighs. "This has been…well, fun isn't the right word, because this hasn't really been fun at all, but I think it's time to turn myself in, don't you?"

Sam struggles to his feet, startled, and Dean feels himself back up a couple more steps towards the door, hand going out to close over the smooth metal of the knob. "What do you mean? Dean—"

"I'm…" He works the knob back and forth, prepared to swing the door wide if Sam should seem to be making the slightest move to stop him. "Look, man, I'm clearly not well…and neither are you if we… Well. The ghosts and the monsters, that's just…that's just delusional and fine, and I guess we're probably not the only folks out here sniffing that particular brand of glue, but if we're… And you're my brother? That's not right, man. I'm crazy, but I know that's not right. Especially if I…" Dean stops, a thought—a really horrifying one—occurring to him. "You don't…? I didn't…? I didn't _hurt_ you, did I?"

Sam looks stricken and for a minute Dean's ashamed of even asking. "No. God, Dean, no. Nothing like that," Sam says. He takes a step in Dean's direction and Dean pulls the door open a bit. Sam stops. "Never anything like that. You wouldn't…"

Dean holds up a hand, not wanting to get into messy apologies or explanations or—God…Heaven forbid—lengthy descriptions. "Good. That…that's good. Okay. Then I'm going to go now. There's got to be a police station or hospital somewhere nearby, right?" He looks at Sam, who's looking a lot like someone just kicked his dog, and he feels something in him soften. "Look…it might not be a bad idea to get yourself some help too, dude. I mean…" He bites his lip, not sure what to say. "All this…motels and scamming folks and…and the other stuff…it can't be very good for you. I mean, it's not exactly normal, is it?"

Sam laughs, a harsh yelping bark. "We don't exactly do so great with normal, Dean."

"Yeah." Dean nods and starts to edge around the jamb. "Yeah, I'm getting that. Still. It doesn't mean we can't. Doesn't mean we shouldn't _try_."

"Dean—" Sam takes another short, curt step. "Can I…? God. Can I at least…kiss you goodbye?"

Dean considers, his fingers tightening on the jamb. A glance out of the corner of his eye confirms that Sam's knife and gun are way on the other side of the room, out of easy reach. The kid's unarmed and the look in his eyes—ripped up and watery—just sort of aches rottenly in Dean's chest. He supposes he doesn't _really_ feel all that brotherly towards Sam anyway. He can pretend to be the brother Sam expects for a couple more seconds. Guy did sort of save him and all. "Yeah, sure," Dean answers. "Why not?"

Sam doesn't rush him, for which Dean's grateful, still clinging to the doorway for dear life. Sam reaches out and those enormous hands go to either side of Dean's face, cupping his jaw, curling behind his ears and then Sam's mouth is on his, warm and sort of sweet, widening to take him in. Sam sucks Dean's bottom lip between both of his and Dean feels this wild, soaring heat kindle low in his belly, spreading like liquor. Dean takes in a breath, dizzy, and the second his mouth opens, Sam's tongue is there, curling through the gap and licking ticklishly-hot across the roof of his mouth. 

One of Dean's hands lets go of its death grip to grab onto Sam's shirt, fisting there, though he's not sure if it's to drag Sam closer or push him away. "Sammy…" he breathes out. Hell, no wonder they're screwing, if the kid can kiss like this.

Then suddenly it all changes and Dean's on the floor looking up at the ceiling and Sam's face. His head hurts from hitting the floor. There's a gunshot sort of noise as Sam kicks the door shut. "You're not going anywhere, Dean," Sam informs him, pushing Dean over onto his stomach while Dean's still sort of dazed and stupid. Cold spikes through Dean—he worries about rape, he worries about the fucking _dildo_ —until Sam grabs his arms and pulls them behind his back. A second later, something goes around his wrists, tying them together. Dean would like to say this is an unfamiliar sensation, but it's not, really. His nose presses into the wood and he tries to not breathe too much, even though his lungs are sort of hurting for air after the kiss and the being thrown to the floor and all. "If I have to fucking hobble your ass."

"I really," Dean takes a deep breath as Sam flips him over onto his back again—which is not so fun for his shoulders, but again, not totally unfamiliar—and starts to tie his legs, "don't think that's necessary."

"God, you're annoying even when you're amnesiac," Sam growls. Dean raises his head and watches. The knots Sam's tying look pretty serious. Kid knows what he's doing, and Dean's cock isn't sure whether it finds that interesting or scary. "How is that even possible?"

"Sam," Dean tries. His throat feels really dry and again, he can't tell if it's because he's turned on or because he's sort of frightened of this kid who can just…slam him around like rag doll and tie knots that would puzzle Boy Scouts. "Look, man, you can't _like_ living like this. I mean, didn't you ever want, I don't know, like…to get married and have kids and a _real_ job and…"

Sam crouches over Dean so that their faces are only inches apart. Sam's face is red and it's not from blushing. He looks as dangerous as Dean never thought he really was and Dean swallows hard, swinging hard and finally over into the _oh, shit_ category. "If you don’t shut up, I'm going to gag you, Dean, I swear to God."

Dean nods and shuts the fuck up.

Sam stares at him for a long time, searchingly. "You called me Sammy," he says finally. His hand brushes over the side of Dean's face and over the short bristles of Dean's hair. It's soft. Gentle. "That means you're still in there, somewhere."


	4. Honestly OK

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to feel  
> safe in my own skin  
> I just want to be   
> happy again  
> I just want to feel  
> deep in my own world  
> but I'm so lonely I don't even want to be with myself anymore  
> On a different day  
> if I was safe in my own skin  
> then I wouldn't feel  
> lost and so frightened  
> But this is today  
> and I'm lost in my own skin
> 
> And I'm so lonely I don't even want to be with myself anymore
> 
> I just want to feel safe in my own skin  
> I just want to be happy again  
> Honestly OK" by Dido

Eventually, Sam unties him.

Admittedly, it's only long enough to get him up and back onto the bed before it's right back to some complicated assembly of bungee cord that runs under the mattress and through the headboard. Dean's legs and arms are a little too numb to offer anything like resistance as Sam first strips him—"Sam—", "Oh God, Dean, I'm not going to _rape_ you. For Heaven's sake!"—and then ties him down again.

"Sam," Dean says, licking dry lips. "You don't have to do this. I won't…"

Sam chuffs, looking down at him. "Okay, Dean? I know you don't know me, but I know _you_. You will. You will lie and grin and say what you have to say and the minute I turn my back or fall asleep, you'll be out of here. And I can't… That's just not happening." Again he skims his hand lightly over Dean's stubbled head and Dean's aware of a vague desire to push up into that touch, the closest thing to affection he's had since… Well, since. "I'm sorry I can't make you more comfortable than this, but…" Sam shrugs. "Try and get some sleep, okay?"

Dean lifts his head and surveys himself. "Yeah, because being tied spread-eagled to a crappy, _lumpy_ bed by my so-called 'brother' is _so_ conducive to a good night's sleep," he grouses and falls back onto the pillow Sam so _considerately_ put beneath his head.

Sam goes to the other side of the room and picks up his gun and knife before returning to sit on the edge of the other bed. He puts the knife under the pillow, removes the clip of the gun, checks the rounds and then shoots the clip back in with the heel of his hand before laying it on the nightstand between them. Then he sits a minute, hands doing that same restless back and forth on his knees, eyes down.

Finally, "Look. That hospital… Those weren't good people, Dean. They weren't people who were trying to do anything but…hurt you, break you, break you down. And I'm not saying we don't have…issues…" It's Dean's turn to laugh, only slightly hysterical; Sam's eyebrows bunch, but he goes on doggedly, "but we're not crazy. You're not crazy. All the stuff I've been telling you…it's real. And sometimes—huh, a _lot_ of times, I wish it wasn't real, but it is. And tomorrow, I'll see… I'll see if I can prove it to you."

Dean looks at the ceiling, quietly and subtly flexing his wrists against the cords. Not much give. Like the knots, Sam knows what he's doing. "And how are you going to do that?"

Sam sighs. It's an exhausted, ugly sound that again brings all those vaguely guilty feelings to the fore. "I'm going to see if I can summon a ghost."

***

_There is a mole on Sam's cheek, close to his nose, under his eye._

_There is another mole on his collarbone, slightly larger, darker._

_They taste completely different._

_The noises Sam makes when Dean touches them each with tongue and teeth is different too._

_It feels like they've been doing this for days—the slow tidal roll of their hips against each other, the join and part of hands and skin, mouths biting and lipping and licking, and the heat that seems to enclose them in a bubble of non-time. It feels like they could do this for days more—slick leisurely slides of hard, moist cocks and soft needy moans dragged out half-unwilling on pulsing waves of pleasure._

_"Dean," Sam says and it's such a layered, complicated noise that it takes him a while to realize it's_ him _, that it's his name. "Dean…"_

This, _he thinks._ This is how it is. This is how it happens.

 _"Sam," he says experimentally, but although_ yes _, there's still an element of_ not quite _. He tries again, "Sammy…"_

_It's like a key. And what it opens is the boy beneath him. Sam's smile blinds him…but the light of it only makes him conscious of the Darkness, slipping serpentine through the edges and corners of his mind._

_It's looking, sniffing, seeking…what?_

_Dean doesn't know, can't remember, but he feels the cold of its presence and he remembers his fear._

_So much fear._

_"Dean," Sam—Sammy—says again. His hands clutch, trying to bring Dean back down to him. "Dean—"_

_It has no head, the shadow, but if it did, the sound of Sam's voice makes it rise and tilt, interested. Panic wells up in a heart-tripping freezing burst and instinctively Dean shoves Sam away from him and down._

_It'll hurt Sam. It'll_ kill _Sam. And that…just can't happen._

 _Sam doesn't want to go. He fights and kicks and scratches, but Dean thinks he'd do anything rather than let that slick and oily blackness touch Sam. Sammy. So he ignores the pain, drops his center of gravity, digs in and_ pushes _, forcing Sam out step by step, backwards and down until Sam is gone and it's only Dean, alone and cold._

_Dean sits down on the ground, shaking and ill, and waits for the slinking darkness to find him._

***

Dean is awake. 

It's only a little twitch under his skin, the transition; he's used to the restraints. Which is good, because he's still tied up. Dean blinks once at the ceiling then turns his head. Sam is sitting on the other bed just watching him. 

"S…Sammy?" Awake, it sounds weirder, like there's some inflection to it that he's missing. Even so, Sam's eyes close and Dean watches a shudder go through him.

"Dean?" 

Dean shakes his head, feeling keenly aware of what Sam's asking with that single syllable. "No."

Sam's face ducks aside for a second and his breath gets louder and more ragged. Dean turns his head back up to the ceiling, giving Sam what privacy he can. 

He doesn't know the last time he dreamed. He didn't dream in the hospital and for all intents and purposes, his life starts there. They said it was the medication.

 _We want you to have a restful sleep while you're here, Dean. The point is to_ free _you from these idle fantasies, not indulge them._

He turns the dream over in his mind. He's grateful for the blankets Sam put over him; his cock's at about half-mast and with his legs tied down, his options are limited on how to disguise that fact. Another something he didn't have to worry about when he was still on his meds. Of course, if he believes Sam, he supposes it's nothing Sam hasn't seen before.

"How did it start?" he asks suddenly. "How…how old were we?"

Sam's voice is muffled, face still turned aside but he answers promptly enough. "Young," he says. "I was…I was twelve. You were sixteen."

"Jeez—" Conditioning stops the profanity in his mouth. Stubbornly, he forces it out, "Jesus."

"There was…a thing. A succubus. It…" He can hear Sam's throat work, a dry clicking like an engine trying to turn over. "It kinda fucked us up real bad."

"I…" The pain in Sam voice is so obviously real and Dean doesn't know what to say to that or about that, but… "What's a succubus?"

Sam laughs. "Christ," he breathes, ragged. Then, more calmly, "It's…it's a kind of demon. A little one. It feeds… God. It feeds off of sex, sexual energy."

"And it made us like this? It made us…?" Dean lets the question trail off.

"No!" Sam sounds disgusted, but there's a harsh tone to it that makes it ring less than true. "Or…sort of. Not really. I… It's complicated."

"There's that word again," Dean says.

"I just… Can we not talk about that? I'll tell you anything else you want to know—about us, about hunting, anything. Just…not that."

"Yeah." Dean shifts his legs, uncomfortable. He's never liked sleeping on his back, though he guesses 'never' is a laughable term under the circumstances. It's too open a position, too…vulnerable. "Yeah, okay." He lets the silence lie for a while, probing the nothingness in his mind like it's a rotten tooth or bruise. He thinks of Sam's smile in the dream, bright enough to turn him blind and wonders if it ever looks like that in real life. Wonders if there's any element of truth—of memory—to the dream. "Twelve?" he asks carefully. He turns his head quietly, afraid that Sam's voice will lie. Twelve is…young.

He still can't see Sam's face; Sam's pulled his leg up and his elbow rests on one long thigh, his face hidden behind his hair and that hand. Still, there's nothing _off_ about his body when he answers dully. "I needed it. I… I _needed_ it and you were there. You were always there."

Dean doesn't exactly like the way Sam's using past tense. He's not sure he can be—or even wants to be—the man Sam remembers, but he doesn't like thinking that door is just _shut_. Like the only past he might have is just irretrievably gone and now there's nothing left but this blank slate.

"I'm sorry," he says and Sam's shoulder hunches a little. "I wish I could remember."

"I know," Sam says thickly. 

"I…" Dean fumbles for what to say. "You have a mole, right?"

"I have lots of moles, Dean."

"No. I mean, _yes_ , but…you have one on…on your collar bone, right?" Dean closes his eyes and tries to remember. "On _both_ your collar bones. There's like…like a constellation of them. Five of them, like an inverted star." He remembers tracing them with his fingertips and tongue and how smooth Sam's skin was, how hot, like it might scald you.

"Yes." The mattress creaks as Sam shifts towards him. 

Dean opens his eyes and finds Sam looking at him again. He shakes his head at the look in Sam's eyes—hopeful, starving. "I don't… That's all I remember, really." Which isn't really true. _I remember what you felt like, under me. I remember how you touched me. Like I was real. Like I meant something. I remember how you said my name._ But that's nothing he's ready to cop to. 

"Well." Sam smiles. "That's something, right?"

Sam unties him, for real this time. "I'm not going to sleep anyway," he says, fingers grinding against his dark circled eyes. "I wonder if there's any coffee."

Dean shrugs and chafes his wrists, even though Sam was careful and they don't really ache all that much. He finds himself oddly fixated on Sam's mouth, visible below the inverted vee of his hands.

"Dean." Sam's hands fall away, to his lap. "I… I won't ask you to promise or anything, but… I'm asking—begging—you. Don't run away. Don't try and turn yourself in. You can't… They _did_ this to you—how can you trust them to help you?"

Dean shrugs and it's his turn to look away. He doesn't know how to explain it to Sam, who looks at him like he sees Dean the Great, Dean the Brave, Dean his Older Brother. It's not that he trusts Dr. Valeri or any of the other people at the hospital, exactly. God, no.

It's that he trusts himself less.

Because he doesn't feel Great, or Brave, or even like somebody's brother. He feels weak and unreliable and really fucking scared, pretty much all the time. He ended up in the hospital for a reason. _Someone_ put him there. Something happened to him.

And until he can remember the reasons, until he _knows_ , he's not trustworthy. To anyone.

***

There is coffee, old and stale and oily with caffeine. Sam drinks cup after cup of it and tells Dean stories.

_You taught me to read from bar signs and newspaper comics. I knew how to read Anheuser Busch before I knew who Dick and Jane even were._

_Dad gave me the gun, but you sat up with me all night, waiting for something to come out of the closet. Nothing ever did, though. I think you were disappointed._

_You were really good at it. I mean…of course you were. You'd been hunting forever at that point. But I think you really liked it, you know? Up there on the mound, staring down the dude at bat…you had that look. Like you were really happy. Like it was what you were supposed to do._

_This one. This scar right here. You sewed it up and ran interference for me with Dad for a week, until it was healed enough that he wouldn't notice. Not that I think he would've noticed anyway. We kind of had two states: life-threatening and suck it up, kid._

_So Dad and I ambushed you from behind the barn, and I had put together these snowballs that had this real cool slushy center, right? But then, when Dad wasn't looking, I dumped it down his neck and took off running while you laid down covering fire. I thought he was going to kill me, but I don't really remember ever seeing him laugh quite so hard._

_I just…I was afraid. I remember being afraid all the time._

_That's Mom. She…everything I know about her, I know because of you. I know she smelled like almonds and Benandre. I know…I know she made the best pancakes in the world, with...crunchy peanut butter on the side. I know we all used to lie on hers and Dad's bed, before I was even born and you and she would sing to me._

_You were my first. You were my first everything._

"You can go to sleep," Dean tells him finally, when Sam starts drowsing halfway through his second pot, his voice faded and scratchy. "I won't… I'll still be here when you wake up."

He thinks it means something that Sam only nods at him before staggering crookedly to the bed and going face down. 

It helps, Dean thinks, that he means it.

***

_You were my first. You were my first everything._

_Hello, Dean! Welcome back to the world of the living! Do you know where you are? This is Arcadia. It's a mental health facility. Do you remember why you're here? Oh, your parents have been very concerned about you, Dean. You're a boy with some very serious problems, yes, yes. But that's okay, we're here to help you get well. I'll be your physician. My name is Dr. Valeri._

Dean watches Sam sleep and feels something hot and ugly turn around and around in his stomach. He'd been a person once, a real person, with family and memories and a life. And maybe it was all fucked up and weird, but it had been _his_ and it was gone. Stolen. Raped out of him by Valeri and her staff. And what they'd tried to put in its place—if he believes Sam—is lies.

 _Dean, I spoke to your mother today. Do you know what she told me? She told me how disappointed she is in you. In your stubborn unwillingness to listen, to take our sage advice. She's disappointed that you continue to hang onto this…well, this_ insanity _. She loves you so much, Dean, and you're breaking her heart. Is that the act of a loving son?_

He wonders if that call ever even happened, if those words were ever really said. If the pretty, kind-looking woman in the photo would be transformed by disgust and regret if she saw him now, like this. He wonders if she knows, about him and Sam. Maybe that's why. 

In sleep, he can see how really young Sam is, despite the few threads of silver gleaming bright in the dark hair. Dean tucks his hands under his thighs against the impulse to put his fingers in the thick strands. _You were my first everything._

 _I needed it. I_ needed _it and you were there. You were always there._

He wonders what could have happened to them, what could make it so that a boy would need _that_ from his older brother. He wonders if that explains or justifies the lingering sense of attraction, of _want_ , that he feels towards Sam. 

The thing is, he wants to believe Sam. Partly because the kid comes off as so sincere, but partly because…well, who _wouldn't_ want to believe they're not insane? Who wouldn't want…a family and a friend, someone who lo…who would break into a mental ward to get you out and whose voice would crack when he said, _They told me you were dead._

Sam's eyelids flinch; he makes a noise under his breath Dean can't classify and his hand reaches out across the empty mattress, searching. A second sound then, equally stifled, and Sam turns over so his back is to Dean, shoulders hunched. 

Dean wants to believe him so much it scares him. It would…validate everything he felt at the asylum—the wrongness, the fear, the pulsing rage that they would do this to him, that they could. It can't make it better, but at least he would have that, the truth of his own mind, his own feelings. But that's exactly why he can't quite trust Sam. Because he wants to.

He thinks of the girl they called Tweenie. She believes she's a changeling, traded by her elfin parents to 'mundanes' here on Earth. Gavin is convinced that Jack the Ripper is sending secret messages just to him by the pattern of wounds left on the Ripper's victims. Horatio thinks he's a sailor from back in the olden days. They believe these things, as deeply and strongly as any delusion Dr. Valeri accuses Dean of, even though Dean has recanted time and again.

_I don't! I don't believe in ghosts! I swear, oh God, please…just stop. Just stop._

_Tsk. Dean. Do you really think we're going to be confused by such a hasty and half-hearted admission? I mean, really? Do you think you're fooling anyone, silly boy? And do not take the Lord's name in vain, Dean._

Dean shivers. Looks at Sam again, the taut line of vertebrae, the soft curve of neck barely visible through tangled hair. 

_We only want to help you, Dean._

He shucks out of his jeans and crawls into the bed—Sam's bed—resolutely ignoring the panicky and screaming voice in the back of his mind going _What are you doing? What the hell do you think you're doing, Dean? He's your brother/he's a stranger and you, you're probably insane…_

Sam stirs groggily as Dean slips under the blankets and mutters, "Dean?"

"Yeah." He feels oddly breathless, as if he's done something far more monumental than slide into bed with someone who is probably his brother. Or maybe he's just underestimating how monumental that is. "It's me."

It feels like a lie, but it's hard to feel guilty about it when Sam reaches out and tugs and curls until he's wrapped around Dean's back, breathing hotly on the back of Dean's head. Dean closes his eyes and tries to tell himself it was always supposed to be like this, that the way tension eases from his shoulders, the way he relaxes back into the curve of Sam's long body is the memory of something and not just fear and loneliness making him reach for something that was never his to begin with.

The last thing he remembers is a single word, simultaneously sun bright and soft as cloud:

Safe.


	5. I Don't Remember

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got no means to show identification  
> I got no papers show you what I am  
> You'll have to take me just the way that you find me  
> What's gone is gone and I do not give a damn  
> Empty stomach, empty head  
> I got empty heart and empty bed  
> I don't remember  
> I don't remember
> 
> I don't remember, I don't recall  
> I got no memory of anything at all  
> I don't remember, I don't recall  
> I got no memory of anything  
> -anything at all  
> "I Don't Remember" by Peter Gabriel

"So I thought of something else last night," Sam says, jumping on the bed next to Dean and sounding both way too casual and _way_ too cheerful for whatever the h…heck it is in the morning. 

Still, it feels perfectly natural for Dean to crack his eyes open and say, "Yeah? What's that?" like he and Sam have been doing this forever—and maybe that's it. Maybe they have. Maybe.

"Something else I can show you, even if I can't call a ghost." Sam's hair is damp. He's got yet another mug of coffee, the brown liquid slopping over the rim as he balances unsteadily on his knees.

Dean reaches up and steadies the cup before he ends up with a lapful of coffee. "What's that?" he asks again. Sam looks sheepish and lowers himself to the mattress. Nervously, Dean gauges the distance between them and wonders if he should move, wonders if it will hurt Sam's feelings if he does.

"I can… There are…" Sam sighs. "I can do things."

"I'm not sure I like where this is going."

Sam rolls his eyes. "Dean. I haven't made a single move on you. I'm not _going_ to make a move on you. I know… I probably shouldn't have told you about the dildo. About us." Sam looks down at the mug dwarfed between his hands. "I'm sorry."

Dean shrugs, uncomfortable. "It…It's the truth, right?"

Sam's mouth twists and Dean can't see his eyes but Sam's voice is a lot softer when he says, "Well, it was."

Dean's fingernail scratches at a nub on the blanket. There's dirt under his nails, a punishable offense. Immediately he starts picking at it with his other hand, before he remembers—there's no one to punish him anymore.

"Anyway," Sam says, oblivious as his head comes back up. He meets Dean's eyes and again Dean sees there's _something_ in them, but he's too thick to read it, other than a forced and manic bravado. "The point is, I can show you something else. Something that's supernatural, even if it's not a ghost."

"But I thought you were going to call a ghost."

Sam shrugs. "I'm going to try, but that's better done at night."

"Oh." That made sense. For a given value of 'sense'. "So what's this other thing?"

Sam grimaces. "Okay, so here's the thing. I'm not really _good_ at this. I can finally sort of do it when I want to and grab whatever it is that I'm reaching for, but…after that it's sort of a crap shoot and my head's going to hurt like a bitch."

Dean shakes his head and spreads his hands. "Yeah. Still no idea what you're talking about, man."

"Yeah, I know." Sam rubs the back of his neck. "I just think we should do this outside. Just in case, you know? And…I might need your help getting back inside, depending on how bad the headache is."

And Dean has to give it to Sam; this may be a line of Grade-A… (he hesitates) bullshit, but the kid knows how to peddle it. Because now Dean _wants_ to know. "Yeah, sure," he says, swinging his legs out from under the blanket and scooting to the far edge. "Why not?"

Sam smiles, bright and shining, and for a second, it's just like Dean's dream.

***

There's snow on the back steps. Dean kicks it away while Sam sludges down and across the yard to put the handful of junk he'd brought outside with him onto a tree stump that's black with wet and age.

"So," Sam says, jogging back and leaning against the stair railing. "Am I just wasting my time here or are you actually open to the idea that maybe your Dr. Valeri is full of shit? Because I'm really not keen on the idea of busting the top of my head open just so you can call bullshit."

Dean opens his arms. "I'm here, right?" All the cold air is cutting through his jacket and he tucks his hands into his armpits again, huddling deeper into the coat. He wonders if he's got a hat somewhere to go with it. His ears are already freezing. Sam hasn't moved and irritably, Dean flaps a hand at him. "C'mon. Aren't you supposed to be amazing me here or something? Do…whatever voodoo you're going to…do."

Sam's mouth twists a little—ironical, not irritated or sad—and he swats idly in Dean's direction without actually making contact. He turns his head and the white, thin sunlight gleams off the curve of his neck. He's sweating. Dean realizes Sam really is nervous. Which…is a little freaky, actually. Dean stomps his feet on the beat down snow to encourage the blood to move through his half-frozen legs and waits for the show to start.

Sam sighs and runs a hand over his head. It's not really effective, because his cap holds the unkempt mop of his hair down, but Dean doesn't think that's the point. Finally—and only because he can't take it any more—Dean comes down the three creaking stairs and kind of…slips his fingers through Sam's.

It's not hand-holding. Hand-holding ( _I didn't! She grabbed me first!_ ) is touching. Touching is a straight shot to the ECT room. Hand-holding is…something you don't do with your brother. So it's not hand-holding.

Sam's fingers are bitterly cold but they close over Dean's right away and he glances sideways, startled. Then his mouth crooks, a different smile but one that Dean thinks he likes just as well. Sam squeezes for a second then lets go as if he senses Dean's growing discomfort and panic. "Watch this," he says and holds out his hand.

The house looks like it was abandoned hastily. Sam had scavenged a _very_ sketchy bottle of beer from the biology experiment that was currently masquerading as the refrigerator. It sits on the stump a little taller than the other stuff that Sam deposited there; when Sam puts out his hand, Dean sees it _jerk_ and shiver and then just… _fly_ off the stump towards them.

Dean says, "Heh," and Sam makes a different noise, soft and stifled. Dean darts a look back at him. Sam's chin dips and his eyes squint, making the sun lines carve deeper, down onto his cheeks. He's not looking and the bottle is flying right at his head and Dean has about a half-second to think about it before he tackles Sam down into the snow.

The cap shoots off the bottle in a hissing spray of stinking foam. A second later the bottle itself shatters and Dean ducks his head, throwing one arm over Sam and the other over the back of his neck. Smelly fermented beer and brown glass rains down over them and the snow in a soft patter.

When it's over, Dean kneels up slowly and brushes glass off his sleeves. "So. The exploding bottle. That was like…" He considers. "Okay, yeah. I don't know what that was like. Blow up things often?"

"I said I only had limited control!" Sam growls, sitting up a lot more carefully than even Dean had. He winces and digs the heel of his hand into his eye socket. "Argh. Wouldn't have done it at all if you would just _believe_ me. Ow."

"You okay?"

"Yeah." Sam tries to push himself up from his sprawl in the snow and fails; his elbow collapses on him and almost pitches him face first into the broken glass all around them. Dean snatches a handful of Sam's jacket and hauls him back, his various and sundry bruises protesting as the muscles flex.

"Liar," Dean says. Still hanging onto Sam's jacket, he gets his boots under him. "Come on, Uri, let's get you inside."

"Uri?" Sam blinks up at him, confused, as Dean tries to figure out how to get them both upright.

"Yeah, Uri Geller. Bends spoons and stuff with his brain?"

"You remember Uri Geller and not your own damn brother?" Sam demands, sounding halfway between pissed and hurt. He winces again, his free hand pressing against his temple this time. "Fuck, that hurts."

"Well." Dean's sorry he brought it up now, his fingers going cold and tingly at the context he last heard the name. He remembers the lozenge holding his mouth open, his tongue down, the things that looked like tiny bear traps that had held his eyelids up and wide. He blinks the memory away and summons up a smile he prays doesn't look as wavery as it feels on the inside. " _Spoons._ Far more useful than exploding beer any day."

"I have a gun, you know," Sam says, as Dean fumbles them both to their feet. "Don't think I won't use…" 

Dean doesn't know what happens to his expression, but he feels his body go wooden and the chill from his fingers blooms throughout his whole body. Sam looks immediately stricken. "Dean… I'm just kidding. You know that, right? You know I'm just joking around, don't you? I wouldn't… I _couldn't_."

"No," Dean says. His voice comes out flat and a little remote and he's sort of proud of himself for that. It sounds strong. "Of course not."

Sam pulls away from him, swaying on his feet and reaches into his pocket for his pistol. Before Dean can pull away, Sam grabs his hand and tugs it forward, slapping the gun into Dean's palm. "Here. Take it. Take it."

"What am I supposed to do with it?" Dean thinks he should feel more secure with the gun in his hand, but mostly, he feels that same thrumming sense of _dangerpanicalarm_ rising in him like the flood tide.

Sam steadies himself on the banister, panting a little in sharp puffs of white. "Well, let's start off with what you're _not_ supposed to do with it. Like point it at me." He pushes Dean's arm aside a little bit. 

"Heh. Right. Sorry."

Sam nods. His eyes are watering, squinting, even though the day isn't that bright. "Okay. Now hold it. Just…hold it. Let your hand get familiar with the weight of it. The feel." He wipes his eyes with his sleeve.

Dean looks down at the firearm. His palm's shifted to cradle the gun's butt. It's heavier than he thought it would be. It feels…not good, exactly, but somehow momentous. Like his hand has just been waiting for this. He turns his wrist, brings the gun up and sights down the barrel.

"Yes," Sam says. "Like that. Look at the stump."

Dean's gaze shifts just in time to see something bright and fast dart up from the stump. His thumb flicks off the safety by reflex; the same with the sight-and-shoot. The gun sounds very loud in the stillness, echoing back flatly. It kicks and he finds himself sort of flexing with it.

The thing—which turns out to be a labelless can—falls back into the snow with a clunk and starts to bleed something that looks like cling peaches from a hole in its side. Dean turns to look at Sam, triumphant, only to see that Sam's collapsed on the steps, white and unconscious.

_Crap._

***

It's after dark when Sam wakes up.

He twitches hard, makes that same hurting, hurtful sound and his eyes crack open slowly and carefully. He closes them again quickly and throws his arm over his face for good measure. "Nnggh."

"You okay?" 

"I…" Sam's hand fumbles for the back of the couch and he hauls himself up a little. "In the dark blue bag…there's like…this blindfold thing. Please?"

"Yeah." Dean gets up from the floor and blots his hands on his jeans. "Yeah, sure."

The blindfold is clearly a homemade thing, skin-soft flannel on one side and layers of pieced together chamois on the other and straps of the same. He brings it back to Sam and helps him tie it around his eyes. He also finds the cache of pills and bottled water amid the first aid supplies and brings them back too.

"Are you going to be okay?" Dean asks again. "Do we need to find you a doctor or something? Do I… Is there something else I should do?"

"No." Sam reaches out and grabs Dean's wrist loosely. Dean finds it a little weird how he does that, without even looking. "I'll be fine in a couple hours. It's just hard."

"Moving stuff with your brain?" Dean backs up a couple steps, pulls gently out of Sam's grip. "Yeah, guess so. Is…is it always like that?"

Sam laughs and then winces right behind it. "Yeah, pretty much. I don't… I don't do it very often. I don't really know what to do with it, how to use it. We've been looking for a teacher for me, but…" He shrugs. "We haven't had a lot of time or the best of luck."

There's history there; Dean can hear it in between the words. He can hear it in everything Sam says to him; an unconscious assumption of time. Slowly, he edges back towards the sofa and sits on the floor again. "How does it work?"

Sam snorts. "I think I proved pretty definitively that it doesn't work."

"You know what I mean."

Sam's smile falters. "Don't know really. I just…it's like a switch in my head and sometimes I can turn it on and sometimes—"

"Sometimes the beer blows up." Dean smiles. 

Sam can't possibly see him through the blindfold, but he smiles back anyway. "Hey, at least it wasn't _good_ beer. I do have some priorities."

Dean looks down at his hands, idly toying with his shoelaces—or really, Sam's shoelaces. The right lace is frayed and there's a little hole in the upper, where his sock peeks through. Dean frowns. "I…I bought you these," he says slowly, hesitating over the knowledge. It flickers in his mind, weak and filmy like a soap bubble and he's afraid to hold onto it too tight.

Sam's face goes very still. "Yeah, you did."

"A long time ago. I thought you got rid of them." 

It surprises him, how easy Sam can go from scary-killer to flustered and blushing. "I… You gave them to me."

Dean looks down at the shoes again. He's wrapped the laces so tight around his forefinger, the tip is white. "I don't remember everything they did to me," he admits, before he can change his mind about it. "There are…holes. Time I lost. Memories I can't get back. Sometimes they come back later. Sometimes they're just gone. I don't really miss them." His finger tingles as the blood rushes back into it. "I mean, I can tell you the stories, what I remember…"

"I wouldn't have asked you to tell me if I didn't think it would help," Sam says gently.

Dean nods, then realizes Sam can't see it. "I get that," he says slowly. "I just… This is the most I've talked in weeks. I don't…I don't know how to tell you what you want to know."

Sam sighs and his head falls back on the pillow, raising a small cloud of dust. "It's okay, Dean. We'll…we'll figure it out."

***

Sam naps and Dean sits there.

He thinks vaguely that there are things he should do, but he can't think of anything. Can't leave. He's already been through all of 'his' things and none of it seems to trigger anything. The only things that have seemed the least bit familiar are the oversized clown shoes on his feet and the gun.

The gun.

Dean reaches out and picks it up off the coffee table gingerly. Like before, his hand adjusts automatically to grip it a certain way, lightly, skillfully. Dean chews his lip and looks at his hand as he angles the gun back and forth. Something itches at the back of his mind and he doesn't know what it is, can't quite get there from here.

Finally, he closes his eyes and lets go. His hands move.

The clip drops into his other hand, heavy, slick. He puts it aside and shoots the chamber. _Never leave one in the chamber unless you're looking to shoot your dick off, Dean-o._ Dean hears the voice in his mind, male and amused, but he doesn't know where it comes from, who it belongs to. 

It takes him about thirty seconds to disassemble and reassemble the gun, eyes closed the whole time. And while he's doing it, when he opens his eyes afterwards and looks at the gun with something approaching awe, he feels that nervous hamster-wheel running part of himself lie down and be still.

 _A hunter, Dean? Really, a hunter? A hunter is someone who…tracks and kills deer or turkeys. Someone with a_ license _that goes out in his pickup truck and drinks too many beers and comes back and tells stories about the one that he almost caught. He isn't a…a ghostbuster, for Heaven's sake!_

Hunter.

He glances at Sam again, thinking of the ease and practice with which Sam holds his weapons, the unconscious and unselfconscious way he moves them with him from room to room, place to place so that there's never a time that one's not in arms reach. Hunter.

_It's our thing. The family business._

Dean gets up and goes to get the guns that had come in with them, before Sam hid the Impala under the tree line and a layer of cut branches and snow. He wonders if his hands will remember them all. He finds a kit with them—gun oil, brushes and rags—and the smell of it all hits him like one of Feisal's lowdown dirty gut punches. He brings it all back to the table, laying them out in neat rows, handguns and shotguns and rifles.

In his sleep, Sam murmurs. Dean stills, but Sam doesn't sound upset or distressed, just oddly content. Sam's hand stretches out, the way it did in the bed, but this time it makes contact with Dean's shoulder, fingers curling over the bone. Sam makes a surprised little, "heh," under his breath and falls deeper into his dreams.

Dean thinks about ducking out from under that light touch; sometimes he's okay with it and other times it just reminds him of the many many things he wished he _could_ forget, but other than a little nervous twist in his belly at the contact, he seems all right. 

_Hunter_ , he thinks again and goes back to the pile of shining metal in front of him.


	6. She's in a Trance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A sort of fury haunts her eyes,  
> Sadness dripping from the skin  
> Unharnessed in her thighs  
> She's moving closer in…  
> Impossible to read  
> Impossible to write  
> And now you understand  
> Why the feeling must be clean  
> She's in a trance…  
> "She's in a Trance" by the Heart Throbs

"How do you know there's a ghost here to summon?" Dean asks curiously, watching Sam put out white candles that hiss slightly when lit and smell pleasantly of roses and honey.

"I don't." Sam chews his thumb as he eyes the setup on the table. "Which—aside from the fact that I've never actually _done_ this before—is the problem. But…" He fusses with the emptied bottles they're using for candle holders, turning them so the labels are exactly straight and in line with each other. "Asher's Grove has a bad history. It's why we were here in the first place."

Dean nods and perches one hip on the couch back. "Is it dangerous?" He's seen the scars that roadmap his body, he remembers Sam's ( _touch_ ) catalogue of how they'd been acquired and when. Valeri and staff had, of course, insisted his wounds were all self-inflicted, but even at the time he knew that couldn't be true. He doesn't feel afraid, though. Just sort of…amped up and curious. It's nice; sparkling and bright and worlds away from the fatigued dullness of the drugs. 

Sam shrugs. "I'll take all the precautions I can," he gestures at the incomplete circle of salt around the table and chairs and the second—larger and also unfinished—chalk circle around it. "But most of the spells and stuff we know are for keeping spirits _out_ of someplace. Not inviting them in. And depending on what kind of spirit…" Sam eyes the table worriedly again, moves their Dad's journal to the other side of the table, straightens it, and then fiddles with the candles again. Then he looks up at Dean. "Yeah. It could be dangerous. You think you feel secure enough with that thing to hit the ghost and not blow my head off?" He nods towards the shotgun tilted against Dean's leg.

Dean picks up the gun with a flourish and gives it an experimental twirl, enjoying again the weird sense of familiarity and comfort. "Sure."

Sam blows his breath out noisily. He still looks worried, but Dean doesn't think it's because of him. "Okay. Okay, then. What time is it?"

Dean looks at Sam's watch, strapped around his wrist. "Eleven forty-five." He pauses, his thumb rubbing over a scar in the rubberized grip on the shotgun's bolt. "You know… you don't have to do this, Sam."

Sam turns his head, surprised. "You mean you believe me?"

"About…ghosts and werewolves and all that...shit?" The pause is barely noticeable; Dean's sort of proud of himself as he grins and shakes his head. "No. Not really. Not totally. But…does it matter? I mean… We could just get out of here. Pack up the car and go. What else am I gonna do? Hang around here?"

Sam shakes his head. "Dean, we can't leave," he says. "Not until we know…until I can figure out a way to make you better. They did something to you to make you like this. Maybe I can reverse it, once I know what it is."

Dean feels the warmth die out of him, the smile fall off his face. "Maybe I can't _be_ fixed," he points out dully. "Maybe…maybe this is just who I am now, and you're just stuck with me. Do you ever think about that?"

He doesn't really want to think about the third possibility: free, but on his own and the next thing to helpless, without even the memories of how to _make do_ in every day life. He wonders if he ever _has_ held down a job or gone to school or done anything other than live this crazy half-cocked shadow-life. He wonders if he's ever had anything or anyone other than Sam.

Just the thought of it—alone—makes his palms sweat and his neck crawl with chill. Not that he's going to tell Sam that.

"Dean, you're _going_ to get your memory back," Sam says placidly, so stupidly blindly confident that Dean sort of wants to smack him. "We'll figure it all out. We always do." He sits down at the table and opens up the journal to a page marked with a bright purple sticky. Dean thinks Sam's hand looks a little unsteady, but that could be the waver of the candlelight or even the last of his migraine. Sam looks up at him again and his eyes are so dark, so steady that Dean feels a little mesmerized. "You ready?"

Dean blots his hands on his jeans, behind his thighs where Sam won't really see. "Yeah. Sure. Abracadabra and stuff."

***

"Oh…holy _shit_!" Dean brings the gun up and to bear almost without being aware of it, fixated on the spectral shape of the… _Oh, just say it, Dean._ …the _ghost_ in front of him.

"Dean." Sam still sounds infuriatingly calm and it irritates Dean again but it also makes him loosen up on the trigger and stand down.

He didn't expect a girl. He didn't expect a _kid_. Okay, the truth is that he hadn't really expected anything at all, even though he thinks he was kind of wishing-hoping for a ghost to appear. But he realizes now he didn't think of ghosts like _this_ —something that used to be human. That used to be a child.

The ritual itself had been almost laughably boring. The candles hissed (holy water soaked wicks, Sam said) and Sam read something in Latin (Dean's pretty pleased with himself for knowing it's Latin, even if he doesn't understand the words) and then burned a handful of herbs in a copper dish. Their smoke and their dusty-sweet scent still lingers in the air, though—weirdly enough—there's a several inch gap in the haze in all directions around the girl's ghost. It's kind of cool, if he lets himself think about it.

One minute she hadn't been there, Dean fidgeting, and the next she had. Dean would say in the blink of an eye except he knows damn well he hasn't blinked. She is—was?—maybe eight and wears a Green Day T-shirt and scuffed jeans. Dean can't obviously hear anything, but it seems to him that she buzzes, a sub vocal hum that makes the bones in the backs of his ears hurt. She moves in stop-motion jump cuts as well, sliding restless and resentful in the space between the two circles—now closed. When Dean looks away from her, from the corner of his eye it looks like she's screaming, her mouth an endless open pit of darkness. But when he looks at her full on, she only looks sad, pitiable. The skin at the back of Dean's neck crawls with goose flesh.

"Who…who are you?" Dean whispers.

Sam shakes his head. "She won't…"

The ghost jerk-sidles forward, vanishing and then reappearing at the edge of the chalk circle looking out at Dean. It puts out its hand. For a minute, Dean thinks it's going to touch him, but then the edge of the chalk circle shimmers and crackles and the ghost's palm smacks against it like a pane of glass. Both Dean and Sam flinch and Dean starts to bring the gun up again. 

Girlish laughter echoes around the room. Dean relaxes his grip on the butt and bolt of the shotgun and then resettles it more securely. His palms are sweaty. His throat's dry. When he glances across at Sam, still seated and safe inside the ring of salt, he sees Sam looks tense and uncertain too, the ends of his hair curling up with perspiration and his fingers tense on the table top.

"They took me down into the dark," the ghost says, though its lips don't move. "They took me _down_ into the _dark._ "

Like an echo: _dark, dark, dark, dark…_ and behind it, that jittery, unfunny laugh.

It looks at Dean with black inhuman eyes. " _You_ know," it says.

"Sam?" Dean says, his voice deepening, picking up an edge.

"Yeah," Sam stammers and looks back down at the journal. "Yeah." Another string of Latin, just as incomprehensible and ending in, " _Recedo. Recedo._ "

The candles flicker and the ghost really _does_ scream this time, a piercing, hollow sound that hurts Dean's ears. Sam's too, from the way he flinches and claps his hands over them. Dean doesn't dare take his hands off the shotgun long enough to cover his own. The windows rattle loudly in their frames and the door jumps and crashes against the lock. All the furniture outside the doubled circles starts to creak and groan and jitter too, raising clouds of dust that glitter in the candlelight and make Dean sneeze.

"They took me down into the dark!" The ghost shrieks. Its hair—long, dark and cut unevenly—moves and swirls, but counter to the nonexistent wind. The laughter gets louder, more cutting. Sam's voice rises, trying to cut over the noise, but even his deep voice can barely be heard.

And then the door blows off its latch and the wind is real. 

…and it's blowing through the thin line of salt that's all that protects Sam from the ghost.

"Sam!" Dean yells. Sam sees it at the same time, pushes back from the table hard, groping for the gun shoved into the back of his pants. The chair pitches over and Sam half-falls, the gun skittering away. Sam scrambles backwards as the salt line breaks and the ghost vanishes.

Dean takes a step forward. "Where…?"

"Dean, don’t cross the chalk circle," Sam says tautly, still edging towards his gun. "It can't get you and if you don't…" Sam doesn't manage to get more than his fingertips on the fallen gun before an unseen force shoves him hard. Sam falls on his back with a grunt.

"Sam!"

_Don't break the circle, Dean. Until you break the circle, it's still trapped._

A second later Sam gasps and arches, hands flying up like there's something around his neck, choking him. His fingers flutter and grab onto nothing.

"Sam?" Dean edges sideways around the circle's edge, brings the shotgun up. He wants to just shoot, make it stop, but there's nothing to shoot _at_.

A flicker. Black and white, like a photograph.

The ghost reappears, both hands locked around Sam's throat, strangling. Dean doesn't even think about it—he shoots. The shotgun blast is deafening, shocking and the gun kicks like a mule right into the socket of his shoulder. The ghost's laughter—mocking, gloating—turns again to one of those horrifying shrieks. Dean fires again, but it's already over. The ghost itself seems to almost fall apart.

The wind dies. The rattling stops. There's still airflow from the open door, but nothing like the gale force winds of a moment ago. Dean crosses the chalk and smeared salt lines and drops to his knees, puts the gun aside. "Sam?"

Sam is coughing, clutching his throat, but he nods. His eyes look red, weeping just enough to make droplets in his lashes.

There's no reason for Dean to touch him, but he does it anyway, fisting his hand in Sam's shirt by his shoulder. He can feel the heat of Sam's skin through his knuckles; he can even feel the knock and drum of Sam's heart. "Sammy—" he says, throat sore and feeling taut.

Sam's eyes come up to Dean's a half-second before his fingers knot in the neck of Dean's shirt. He tugs once, briefly, like he's going to pull Dean down to him. Then all at once he lets go, his hand flinching away like he's burned. Sam's eyes close and he shakes his head. Dean hears the apology as clear as if Sam said it: _sorry, sorry._

It takes Dean a minute to fit it all together. It takes him another minute to kind of screw his courage up, but as before, his hands seem to be way ahead of him in the memory department; Dean's thumb traces over Sam's bottom lip, the callus on the ball catching on dry skin. Sam's eyes flicker open; his lips part a little so that Dean can feel the warmth and dampness of his breath. His thumb pushes a little deeper, further, to find the wet-silk line just inside Sam's mouth and Sam lets him, tilting his head back a little. The line of his throat is exposed, shining with sweat. Sam swallows and Dean watches his Adam's apple bob.

Heat flickers in Dean's groin. _Your brother,_ a voice reminds him. _A stranger._

_Sam._

Dean guesses if he wasn't in the habit of doing stupid things, he never would have been put in the hospital in the first place. "You okay?" he asks Sam softly and Sam nods again, Dean's thumb still pressed against—into—his mouth.

Dean sighs and leans down. He means to be quick. He shouldn't be doing this at all so he means it to be fast, furtive, something he can deny later. Or even right now. 

It's not even good, exactly; the angle's all wrong and their teeth clack together. His tongue butts against Sam's and it’s not smooth or suave or practiced. It's clumsy and it's awkward and it's _stupid_ and Dean's shaking and Sam is too and then suddenly either Sam twists his head or Dean shifts his and it starts working.

Oh, _fuck_ , it starts working.

Sam makes a sound, soft and needing and his hand comes up so that his fingertips are just brushing Dean's jaw, like the need to touch outweighs his fear of doing so…but only by a tiny margin. Dean's hand tightens in Sam's shirt, pulling Sam up, so that his back is supported on Dean's bent knee. Sam shivers and slowly, he touches Dean's cheek in that same light, hesitant way. Dean can feel each finger, separate and distinct on his skin.

When they break apart, Dean pulls back, eyes half-slitted and his mouth feeling loose and slutty. He licks his lips. Sam looks hungry, but he looks scared too. And Dean gets it. 

"Okay," Dean says. "Ghosts. Now can we never do that again?"

Sam chokes a little in surprise, but then he laughs.


	7. Love to be Loved

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This old familiar craving  
> I've been here before, this way of behaving  
> Don't know who the hell I'm saving anymore  
> Let it pass, let it go, let it leave  
> From the deepest place, I grieve  
> This time I believe
> 
> And I let go  
> I can't let go of it  
> Though it takes all the strength in me  
> And all the world can see  
> I'm losing such a central part of me  
> I can't let go of it  
> You know I mean it  
> You know that I mean it  
> I recognize how much I've lost  
> But I cannot face the cost  
> 'cause I love to be loved  
> "Love to be Loved" by Peter Gabriel

Ghosts. Dean's shoulder, the funny one, aches. He rubs it reflexively and wonders if the arnica cream will help with this too. But mostly he thinks about the ghost. The sadness and anger in her voice when she said, "They took me down into the dark."

He wonders what that means.

He wonders why he feels like he knows.

"Dean," Sam says and Dean looks up. "I have something I want to say to you and I want… I want you to just be quiet and let me get it all out."

"Okay." Dean sits down and grabs the edge of the mattress. He thinks this is it; the moment Sam tells him: _I just can't do this, man. I'm sorry, but you're just going to have to go your own way, because I can't handle you when you're all brain damaged and not…him._ He looks down at his feet. The sock has been mended; he wiggles his big toe and watches the red thread flex against the white. It's not like he hasn't been expecting this. "What's up?"

"I'm sorry," Sam says. Dean looks up sharply, freezing in place like his ass has been glued down. "I'm sorry it took me so long to get to you, to find you. I'm sorry I was too late."

"You thought I was dead," Dean points out and Sam shakes his head. "And you weren't too late."

"I was. And it's not… That's not good enough. I'm supposed to have all these powers, I'm supposed to fucking _help_ people and I couldn't even help my brother. I couldn't stop them from hurting you." He looks up at Dean through the messy fringe of his hair and he looks…just so young and miserable. "I… When they told me you were dead I just… I just broke. Days where I couldn't… I couldn't do anything, except lie in that stupid motel bed. I didn't eat. I didn't sleep, because I was afraid of what I'd dream. I was afraid…" Sam's hands are knotted together between his legs. They're white knuckled, the skin pulled taut enough to split. "I was afraid."

"Sam…" He doesn't know what to say. He never really does. "You came."

"What do you mean?"

"You thought I was dead. But…you came anyway. You found me and you came to the hospital and you got me out. That's what… That's the important thing."

Sam's shaking his head again, more emphatic.

"Sam…" He's stuck somewhere between wanting to smack Sam and wanting to do…other things to him, show him that he's fine. That getting out, getting away is enough. And he knows: Sam wants him. Or…Sam wants Dean. And it's the same thing and it's not and Dean doesn't know how to reconcile that gap.

He doesn't remember. He doesn't remember Sam, not really, and that doesn't make it all right or sane or a good thing, but he's tired, he's so very tired, and even if he doesn't remember Sam, Sam remembers him and maybe that's enough. Maybe he can make that be enough; just pour himself into this ready-waiting shape in Sam's mind and let it hold him up for a while. Until he remembers. Or until it feels like remembering.

Dean moves to stand in the space between Sam's spread legs. Sam's face turns up to him and he leans back a little, giving Dean room. He looks tired—exhausted—but also a little at peace. Dean puts his hands on Sam's skin, which is just as warm as he'd thought it would be. Dean's thumbs sweep lightly across the curves of Sam's cheekbones and he looks a question—or maybe a warning—into Sam's eyes. _I'm not him. I can't be him._ Sam's eyes shut in a flutter of dark lashes then open again, unflinching. Between Dean's hands, he nods slightly and Dean feels something flutter in his groin, hot and sugar sweet.

Given permission, Dean bends down to that wide mouth that opens to meet him. Sam's hands light on the sides of Dean's thighs, sliding over hips and under his shirt to band around Dean's waist, almost wide enough to span it. Sam's thumbs roam circles over the flat muscles of Dean's belly, making it shake. Dean inhales and Sam opens wider, stretching up like he's going to crawl inside Dean through his mouth, or devour him down. It's zero to sixty from _hmm_ to _ohsweetgodnownow_ and when Sam's hands release him to pluck and pull at his belt, Dean sways, unsupported. Dean slides his fingers into Sam's soft, long hair the way he's been wanting to almost since they met, cradling the back of Sam's head between his hands. 

Sam grins through the kiss; Dean finds himself smiling back and Sam tugs him down so that Dean has to slide his knees onto the mattress or fall. The kiss breaks. Sam sidles backwards, pushes Dean's jeans apart and hooks his fingers in the waistband and that of Dean's boxers to pull them down his thighs. Dean pulls his T-shirt over his head, tossing it somewhere behind him before falling on Sam's mouth again, sucking, biting, thrusting back and forth with and against Sam's tongue. One of Sam's hands squeezes the back of Dean's thigh rhythmically while the fingers of the other tweak Dean's nipple, hard pressure-pain that Dean didn't even know he was _missing_ until Sam was doing it, forcing soft, longing moans from his mouth to Sam's.

Sam pulls back a little. "My…my back," he says, looking up into Dean's face with something approaching shyness. "Just…run your hands down my back, along my spine…" His breath hisses out and his eyes close when Dean does, head falling back, body bowing forward in a sharp arch. Dean can feel the shuddering ripples that go through Sam at his touch; Sam keens softly against Dean's ear. He rakes his fingertips over the thin cotton layer of Sam's T-shirt. His cock paints wet, arcane shapes against Sam's front with every soft instinctive push of his hips. "God…God, like that…"

"You have on too many clothes," Dean murmurs back, hooking his thumbs under the hem of Sam's shirt and tugging it up, letting his fingers drag after, against the goose-pebbled skin of Sam's back. He likes this trick. He likes it a _lot_. Almost as much as he's going to like seeing Sam naked. Sam ducks his head, letting Dean chuck the shirt over his hair and then slips one hand familiarly between Dean's legs, hefting and stroking Dean's balls in ways that make his knees weak and his stomach tighten. Two long fingers tease the base of his cock, stirring it to greater attention…which up to that point Dean hadn't thought was even possible. "Sam…"

This is weird. This is _weird_ ; feeling like he barely knows Sam, feeling awkward and out of place and yet having his body played with this completely thoughtless ease that tells him beyond a shadow of a doubt that Sam has done this to him—or this body, at any rate—before. Sam bites his way up Dean's shoulder and neck to the skin behind his ear and the arm not working Dean's cock goes around Dean's waist, urging him down to the mattress as Sam lies back under him.

There's some wrestling, getting Dean's jeans and boxers the rest of the way off and getting Sam out of the rest of his clothes. Dean's mouth goes dry, seeing Sam bare-skinned, seeing the extent of Sam's desire in his half-lidded eyes and bobbing red-tinged cock. For him. Sam's so hard, the tip wet and more gathering at the slit. Dean runs his palm over it, less sexual than fascinated, but Sam bucks up into that light touch anyway, his hand closing over Dean's to curve around his dick and stroke.

"Want you," Sam says, low and growling. "Want you so much, Dean. I've been missing you."

Dean stiffens.

Sam sees it right away, letting go of Dean's hand and sitting up. His hand hovers at Dean's shoulder awkwardly, like he wants to touch but isn't sure if he can or should. For a moment, and despite the urgent vote of his dick, which is feeling _very_ unfairly unloved, Dean's not sure either. "I…shit, I'm sorry, Dean. I just…"

Dean shakes his head. This can be complicated—it already _is_ ridiculously complicated—but he doesn't want it to be. He's tired of complicated. And yeah, it's weird and possibly really fucking perverted and all that, but it's also really hot and pretty nice to be touched by someone who's only trying to make him feel good. So…to hell with complicated. He can do complicated later. "It's okay," he says and reaches for Sam's cock again, surer this time.

Sam's hand closes over his wrist and Sam's eyes search his. Then, apparently okay with whatever he sees, Sam lets go.

"I don't know what you like," Dean says. It's harder to say than he'd thought it would be—which was pretty hard—his throat closing up with that same frustrated helplessness of _can't remember, should remember, why can't I remember?_

Sam smiles and it's not his sympathetic smile or his guilty smile or anything but this happy grin that makes Dean's shoulders relax and pushes the corners of his own mouth up in response. Dean's dick seems to like it just fine too, knocking against his belly like it doesn't already have his attention. Maybe it's just glad to be up and around again. Dean thinks he's pretty glad about it too. 

"Jesus, Dean, look at me," Sam says. "Pretty much anything you want to do…" Dean's hand tightens involuntarily; his thumb strokes hard against the head of Sam's cock. Sam's head falls back, his groan soft and drawn out. His hand closes over Dean's forearm, squeezing. "I just want your…your hands on me."

Dean presses against Sam, licking his tongue between Sam's lips again, dipping in when Sam opens and angles up to seal their mouths together. And Sam's leg is wrapping around his hip, and Sam's hand is gripping the back of his neck hard enough to bruise and his fingers are digging into Dean's back, dragging Dean closer and closer into him. Dean has zero problems with this plan of action. "Sam," Dean mumbles into that hot, smooth skin, dotted with tiny moles almost like his own skin is dotted in freckles. "Sammy…"

It's right that time; he can tell even before Sam gasps and thrusts hard into the circle of Dean's fist. Sam's hand creeps down, over the curve of Dean's ass, slipping between to finger over him, a touch that zips cold-hot and electric up and down every nerve ending Dean's got.

"I want to fuck you," Sam whispers, tongue darting into the dip above Dean's upper lip before he nips, teeth sharp like a fox's. "Fuck, Dean… Can I? Can we?" His fingertip slides in, just a little, careful and slow and _that's_ weird, a whole lot weirder than kissing and grinding against another guy, a guy that's supposed to be your brother, but what's strangest of all is that it's not that weird at the same time, a feeling almost familiar. A feeling that's pretty awesome, while he's at it. 

_Your family's worried about you Dean. About your…appetites. There's a proper time and place and_ way _for…that sort of thing, and that's part of what you're going learn here._

_Shut up. Shut up. You don't know me. You just made it all up._

"Yeah," he says, not sure whether to wriggle back on that intruding finger or not. "Okay. Sure." 

Saying yes, it seems, is a lot easier than getting to the actual fucking, which seems to take a lot more preparation than Dean signed up for, between getting the bottle of oil from its hiding place in his luggage and the rearrangement of their bodies and the slicking up of Sam's fingers and the hard, rigid length of his cock.

Turned on his side, feeling awkward and sort of annoyingly virginal, Dean is irritated and impatient up to the point that Sam curls halfway around him, pressing his tongue into Dean's mouth and pressing his fingers into Dean elsewhere, skating deftly over _something_ in Dean that makes him whine really embarrassingly and try and drive himself backwards and more firmly onto those impaling fingers. Oh, _hell_ yes.

"Wait," Sam murmurs, his broad palm cupped across Dean's ass. Sam bites his jaw and that really good spot on his neck. Sucks a little so it throbs, warm and pulsing. Dean's whine deepens, becoming a moan. "Wait. Let me make it good for you, Dean." He crooks across that spot again and Dean's dick starts weeping like the baby Jesus while Dean tries to rub two brain cells together into something resembling a thought.

They did this… _used to do this_ all the time? Like…any time they wanted? How the hell did they ever get anything else _done_? How can he not _remember_ this?

"Sam—" he bleats, strangled and sort of panicked, because he isn't sure how much more of this he can take, but he suspects Sam is going to show him. In excruciating detail. "Sammy…"

"Again." Sam's nose touches the back of Dean's neck, his hoarse, panting breaths puffing right between Dean's sweating shoulders. "Please. Say it again." His fingers slide in and out, steadily rocking over and past the sweet spot until Dean's whole body undulates to the same rhythm.

 _Anything. Anything you want me to say._ "Sammy," he repeats, in his newly discovered _right_ inflection. He arches his back and reaches over his shoulder to dig his hand into the damp and heated tangle of Sam's hair. "Sammy, God, Sammy, please…"

"Yeah." Sam's voice deepens in a way that makes shudders run up from Dean's _toes_ and on the next stroke, there's another finger in Dean, stretching him wider. Sam's knee nudges Dean's thigh, pushing his leg forward and canting Dean's hip so Sam can spread him further, fuck him deeper. The teeth are back on Dean's neck and shoulder, the skin soothed momentarily by the soft swipe of Sam's tongue and then chewed again. Dean's going to be wearing Sam's marks tomorrow like fucking jewelry and why—God, _why_ —is that so hot? "Yeah. Dean. God. Dean. _Dean._ "

And just like the variations between Sam and Sammy and _Sammy_ , Dean hears the difference in the way Sam says his name from how anyone else does. It's not a memory, exactly, but he knows—he _knows_ —this is theirs and theirs alone. 

Dean lets go of Sam's head and grabs a handful of taut-muscled flank instead, bringing Sam up against him. Sam shudders again, a ripple Dean feels all along his own body, they're so tightly wrapped around each other. "C'mon," he says, impatient again over a thin frost of fear and a wide, deep river of _ohyeahrightnow_.

"Gonna fuck you now," Sam whispers between bites. "God, _need_ to." His fingers slowly leave Dean's body and Dean whimpers in protest. "Shhh." One wet lick around his earlobe and the sound of more lube being squeezed from the bottle. Then Sam's cock is pressing against him and Sam's hand, sticky wet, is wrapping around his dick, sliding slick and sure-handed from his balls to the head. Dean can't help it; his back arches, pushing his hips, his cock, into that tight, knowing grip. 

"This is what you like," Sam tells him, in that drawling slow sex-voice that makes it hard to even pay attention to the words. His thumb toys with the slit of Dean's cock, circling and dragging and then moving away to tease the ridge, the vein on the underside. Then back to the head. Dean feels like his whole being is centered on wherever Sam's thumb is, unable to process anything but that touch, so intense, so keenly aware of everything that makes Dean clench and whine. "This is how you like to be touched, stroked. When I do this…" 

Dean's heel digs against Sam's shin, his fingers dig into Sam's hip hard and he'll never admit the sound that comes out of his mouth to any living creature. God. _God._ Sam is a genius. A bona-fide _genius_.

Sam shifts a little and Dean feels the head of his cock again, pushing against Dean's ass. Dean wants to open himself and take Sam into him; it's all he can think about, other than that maddening teasing slip-glide of Sam's hand over him and the gutter-filthy whisper of his voice in Dean's ear, telling Dean what he likes and how.

 _And he's not wrong._ Everything he does—every whisper, every touch—keeps pushing Dean further, making him burn hotter, until he thinks there may be nothing at the end but a smear of ash on scorched sheets.

Then Sam murmurs, "This is going to hurt. Breathe," and his fist starts to move faster as he shifts and _pushes_.

Oh God. Oh _God._ It does hurt, but Sam's hand on his dick keeps distracting him and Dean pinballs back and forth between pleasure, pain, pleasure, pain until he can't separate them and he isn't sure he wants to and Sam is _sliding_ and Sam is snugged inside him so deep he can feel Sam's balls against his ass cheeks. "Sam… _Sammy…_ "

"I know." Sam's shaking, still in him, letting Dean deal with that feeling of _ohGodtoofull_ and _ohGodtoomuch_ ; his arm snakes under Dean and across Dean's chest, holding Dean against him. He slows on Dean's dick, reaching to cup Dean's balls, rolling them between his fingers. Dean's head arches backwards to Sam's shoulder. "I know, Dean. It… Just let me… It'll be good again, I promise."

Dean just shakes his head, beyond being able to answer in anything approaching words. It's already _good_. He pushes back, feeling Sam sink just that little bit deeper and they groan in something like tandem. Sam takes the hint, his hips rocking against Dean's. His knee pushes Dean's leg again, urging Dean half onto his stomach. The change of position puts the head of Sam's cock right over that same spot as before and Dean cries out, burying his face and clenching his fists in the bedspread.

"Nobody," Sam says, his voice shaking with growing urgency. "Nobody but me's ever been here, like this, inside you like this. Only me…"

 _Only me…_ Dean shivers and his whole body jerks. Sam slides deeper still and it feels like there's no space inside him that's not filled up with Sam.

"Dean," Sam moans and it sounds broken and trembling, full of the same something that Dean sees whenever Sam looks at him. "God, Dean, I'm sorry, I can't, I can't…" His arm tightens, welding Dean back against him and his thrusts pick up speed, hip bones slamming against Dean, his cock returning again and again in Dean to touch off explosive chain reactions of syrup-thick pleasure.

But that's okay; Dean's _just fine_ with it and all he can really manage is a choked and strangled, "Yes," but it burns its way out of him on each push, an endless string of _yes, yes, yes, Sammy, yes_.

Sam goes first, a loud, heartbroken almost-scream and sudden wet heat within that slicks the way even more, even better, so that it's only a second before Dean follows, shaking and crying and utterly mindless other than _now, yes, now._

Slower now, and then just slow. Languid butterfly thrusts while Sam softens and shrinks and Dean remembers how to breathe. Sam's mouth drifts over his skin, gentler, sloppy, just wet presses of lips and tongue. His arms are around Dean, leaving no space between them, only a tangle of bones and skin and it's warm and comfortable and good. Dean breathes, eyes closed, content to just have this. 

"Thank you," Sam whispers, almost below the threshold of hearing. His fingers stroke Dean's pectoral, just over his heart.

Dean tries to nod, but he doesn't know if he quite makes it before sleep swallows him up in arms nearly as warm as Sam's.


	8. Lonely No More

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What if I was good to you?  
> What if you were good to me?  
> What if I could hold you till I feel you move inside of me?  
> What if it was paradise?  
> What if we were symphonies?  
> What if I gave all my life to find some way to stand beside you?
> 
> I don't wanna be lonely no more  
> I don't wanna have to pay for this  
> I don't want to know the lover at my door  
> Is just another heartache on my list
> 
> I don't wanna be angry no more  
> You know I could never stand for this  
> So when you tell me that you love me know for sure  
> I don't want to be lonely anymore  
> "Lonely No More" by Rob Thomas

_They don't need you. Not as much as you need them._

_Those voices in your head, Dean…you know they're not real, don't you? Your father, your mother, they both love you very much. They want you to get better, so that you can come home. Don't you want to go home? But you have to stop with these fantasies of ghosts and demons, Dean. You have to_ want _to get well. Let go of your delusions. They want to love you, Dean, but how can they, if you keep hurting them like this?_

 _I could smell it on you then, that_ want _. It's sick, your own brother._

_When this is all over, you're gonna have to let me go my own way._

_As long as you persist in listening to them, the voices will always have this power over you, Dean. Oh, honey. Can't you see? You're not a…what did you call it? Oh, yes. A hunter. You're not a hunter; you're just a very confused young man._

_I'm a freak. And sooner or later, everybody's going to leave me._

Dean twitches and his eyes open.

Still curled around him, Sam's arms tighten. Dean doesn't move, still not quite hitting on all cylinders to understand the where, why or how of this moment and half-tangled by his dream. He's vaguely sore but he knows dimly that it’s the ache of the well-fucked and not unpleasant at all. Even as he comes more into wakefulness, he's not sure how he ended up here, like this, in the arms of a man who calls him his brother and not in that 'hey dude, what's up' way.

He's not sure what he thinks about it, how he feels. The body glow is awesome, no doubt, but the rest of it… 

Shit. And here comes complicated all over again.

He knows what Dr. Valeri and the hospital staff told him is a lie. He can't skirt around that anymore and he's _relieved_. Relieved not to be insane, relieved that he doesn't really deserve any of the things they did to him. Relieved that the anger bubbling red-hot and smoking deep in him is justified and right.

But even knowing, he has a hard time _believing_. 

Because this is not normal, fucking your brother. Hunting ghosts, demons and other things he can't even imagine but is sure are meticulously outlined—some of them _in his own handwriting_ —in that freaky journal. Because—for all the helpless yearning love and lust he sees in Sam's face when he looks at Dean, for the expert way Sam knows every good trick and spot to reduce Dean to a quivering and spent mess, for all the silly, scary, fond stories he can tell about their supposed history—Dean knows Sam isn't telling him everything.

It's like a line in the sand; like they have no history past 2001 and only fragments before that. Sam will talk about their father or their mother, but Dean doesn't know where they are, if they're still alive, what happened to them to put that ache in Sam's voice when he talks about them. Dean imagines car accidents. He conjectures plane crashes. He imagines Mary walking away as John tries to turn his sons into perfect soldiers, since she seems to be in far fewer stories than John. He contemplates them finding out what their children have been _doing_ to each other (since the age of twelve and sixteen, Jesus) and turning their backs in silent and definitive disapproval.

The point is, he doesn't _know_. 

Just like he doesn't know anything about why Sam won't talk about much of anything in between. Just the now—the job, the hospital, Asher's Grove—and the then—learning to be hunters, traveling, clandestine sex in motels and fields and the back seat of their car.

"Dean." It's a mumble, only half-awake, but it's also _right behind his ear_ and deep-voice-growly enough to make him jump. Sam's hand makes feathery scratches where it curves around Dean's side.

"Yeah?"

"Just…stop thinking, man. We can think later. We can think tomorrow." His lips slur dryly against Dean's neck, his fingers shift to trace gentle circles around Dean's navel. "This is right now."

Dean doesn't know why that makes his throat ache, worse when Sam sleepy-sighs and bends tighter around Dean's body, nuzzling into the nape of Dean's neck.

"Sleep," Sam mutters and it's not a command, but Dean's body acts like it is.

***

When Dean wakes again and for good, Sam is already awake. He smells like soap and fresh water; his hair feels damp where it rests against Dean's head. Sam's hand cups him low down, thumb sliding speculatively up and down the length of Dean's half hard cock.

Dean inhales, not quite steadily and the minute he does, Sam's teeth close wetly over Dean's ear, tongue flicking against the lobe. It's apparently another one of those triggers that Dean didn't know he had until Sam's all up on it, making him hiss and push back against Sam's very interested erection. Dean's dizzy for a minute as all the blood in his body tries to locate southward.

"Dean?" Sam asks and it's actually a really hesitant question, despite the insidious roaming knowledge of his hands.

_Stop thinking, man. We can think later._

And the thing is, his dick's vote notwithstanding, he wants to. And that's as uncomplicated as it gets. 

"Yeah," he says gruffly, already tightening in anticipation. A thought occurs to him then. He turns over and finds Sam eyes already hot and liquid with want. Dean can't think about that too much; it's still prickly and strange, but he has no hesitation about leaning forward to capture Sam's bottom lip with his teeth, his fingers sweeping lightly up the inside of Sam's parted thighs to fondle first the softness of his balls and then his cock, which isn't soft in the least.

Sam makes a noise, quiet and needy, sliding the brief distance across the sheets to bring them closer together. Dean's other arm slides under Sam and traces sharp, clear lines along Sam's backbone. Another moan, louder this time, one that goes straight to Dean's dick, and in his hand, Sam's cock jumps almost violently and swells harder. 

Dean releases Sam's lip and pushes him down in the bed, not giving himself too much time to think about this, other than the primal _I want to_ driving in the first place. His thumb slips from Sam's pubic hair to the tender veined skin of his hip and then he's gripping hard and taking Sam into his mouth. 

"Dean wh…oh, oh _God_!" Sam's hand shuts hard on Dean's shoulder, fingertips digging into the bone.

The head of Sam's cock bumps over Dean's palate and Dean lets his tongue ride hard against the underside. Sam bucks up hard and Dean backs off quickly, his throat closing in protest. "God," Sam says, contrite, "I'm sorry, Dean, dammit, I'm sorry… I just wasn't expecting…"

Dean reaches up and puts his fingers over Sam's mouth, silencing him. Dean sucks and nibbles on the head, simultaneously firm and yielding, bitter-salty with the taste of Sam's pre-come, dribbling onto his tongue. Sam's head falls back, his chest bows up and his thighs tremble wildly with the effort not to thrust up into Dean's mouth again. His cry is wild and bordering on hurtful; Sam's hands go to the sides, fisting in the sheets.

And this isn't memory, really. Not exactly. There's no voice telling him _this is what Sam likes_ the way Sam had catalogued Dean's preferences in his ear last night. Call it muscle memory, maybe. Body reflex. If Dean stops _thinking_ so damn much and just opens his mouth and throat and goes, then his body follows, sucking and tonguing and delicate scrapes of his teeth in places that leave Sam whining and begging, hips twisting under Dean's pressing hands.

"Please…please Dean. I don't…" Dean tilts his head and takes all of Sam, down to the root, his throat quivering with the effort to hold and be still. Sam's head thrashes, the shower dampness of his hair turned to sweat-wetness, the heat and smell of his body rising above the fragile scent of the soap. "Not like this. I want…fuck, let me…Dean, please let me touch you…." He reaches for Dean and Dean grabs Sam's hands, twining his fingers through Sam's longer ones and putting them flat to the mattress. It makes it harder to contain the helpless thrust of Sam's hips, pushing him deep into Dean's mouth and throat, but even if he doesn't remember how to take it, his body does. 

"No," Sam's moaning still, distressed sounding and struggling to tug his hands from Dean's. "No, please. Not like this, Dean… _ah!_ …not… I just…let me touch you. Please."

Dean ignores him, feeling Sam's body respond even if his words don't; Dean's mouth is coated with Sam's fluid and he pulses and twitches with every flick of Dean's tongue. This is so familiar, almost comfortable, even down to the unsteady jaggedness of Sam's voice as he protests. He feels like he's almost on the cusp of something; something more than a simple orgasm, more than mere recollection—something huge.

Suddenly, Sam's legs are drawing up and he's twisting away, pulling abruptly out of Dean's mouth so he coughs and chokes. Dean pushes away in the other direction, startled and a little pissed. "…the fuck, man?"

Dean's a little weirded to see the look on Sam's face, wild-eyed and frantic.

"Sam?" he says, more cautiously. He puts his hand on Sam's calf. Sam flinches, but he doesn't jerk away. Then suddenly he lunges up and at Dean, bowling Dean back onto the mattress hard enough to drive the breath out of him. His hands shove Dean down, grinding on the bone.

Dean doesn't know what Sam sees in his face, but after several seconds of long, uncomfortable and intense staring, Sam's expression crumples and softens and so does the grip of his fingers and the press of his knees on either side of Dean's thighs. Dean shoves Sam back, sliding from underneath him.

"This isn't working," Dean says, and he's frankly fucking amazed at how calm it sounds coming out.

Sam's eyebrows wrinkle and the skin makes a little vee between them. "I…I'm sorry. I didn't mean…" One hand pats Dean absently and softly on his leg.

Dean shakes his head. "No. You're not understanding me. This. Us. This isn't working."

"Look," Sam sits back on his heels, "I know…" He rakes a hand through his hair. "I know I tweaked out a little there…"

Dean snorts, incredulous.

Sam's eyes flick away. "Okay, I tweaked a lot. But you don't understand."

"No," Dean agrees. "I don't. And that's the problem. I'm not him, man. I mean…maybe I was. But I'm not him _now_. You keep looking at me and you see him. You expect me to _be_ him. And I can't. And…it's just not working."

"Dean, you're going to get your memory back."

Sam looks so young, so fucking _young_ , and Dean remembers again that he's supposed to be the older one, that Sam's supposed to be leaning on him and not the other way around. "I don't know that. You don't know that. I just know what I've got—who I am—now. And I don't remember you." His jaw and mouth ache distantly; his lips feel swollen, bruised. "Not enough to keep from almost getting my jaw broken when you decide you've got some issues."

"Dean—"

"No, man," Dean cuts him off. "I mean, I realize I'm a little fuzzy on some concepts, but since when is getting your dick sucked a bad thing?"

"It's not," Sam protests.

"Well, I got to tell you, Sam, my face begs to differ."

"You held me down," Sam says softly, his face turned away.

"I…" Well, shit. Dean can't exactly deny that one. 'It seemed like a good idea at the time' doesn't exactly seem like the best answer to something like that. "I was also sucking your dick, Sam," he says again as if repeating the obvious will somehow make it more…obvious. "What the hell did you think I was going to do to you? Hurt you?"

"No! I… It's complicated."

"I am so fucking _sick_ of that word, Jesus fucking Christ!" Dean swivels and shoves off the bed, snatching up yesterday's discarded clothes from the floor. 

"Dean—" Sam's scrambling off the bed behind him, but once he's up, he hovers uncertainly, like he doesn't know what to do with himself. "What…? Wait. Where are you going?"

"Asher's Grove," Dean says, surprising himself.

"What, _now_?"

"No, not now," Dean says testily, stepping into the jeans. Even pissed, he's careful with the zipper because that's _all_ he needs. "Now I don't know where the fuck I'm going except the hell away from here." 

"Dean, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't know what else I can say to you…"

"Why don't you start with the truth?" Dean says. "Why not with why you freaked the fuck out on me when all I was trying to do was make you feel good? Why not with _one damn thing_ that happened between 2001 and now? And if you say 'complicated' one more time, I swear, Sam, I'll deck you." 

Dean knows he should leave. He _wants_ to leave, the desire to get out, to flee and never look back pounds in his heart like a secondary beat. Sam scares him. Not just the strange pitfalls in their every conversation or the terrifying implication of his powers as he'd moved objects and summoned ghosts with the power of his mind. He doesn't discount them and they are…large enough.

But there's also this pull in him, the one that won't let him leave, the one that keeps him asking for answers he's not even really sure he wants. Because he apparently doesn't have to remember Sam to feel need for him. To want him. And behind Sam, there's this huge tangle of _complicated_ that Dean's afraid will drown him if he lets it in, if he lets himself remember too much. There has to be a reason he forgot all this. There are so many things he still remembers—why is the hunting the thing he forgot? Why Sam?

"I'll tell you," Sam says, looking up at him. His voice is dull, but there's an edge of white all around his eyes, a barely contained panic. "I'll tell you everything. Anything. Just… Don't go, okay? Don't leave."

Dean feels like he hears an implicit 'me' on the end of that sentence: _Don't leave me,_ and he wonders if that's something he did before, to put this fear in Sam like this.

"You held me down," Sam says again in that same drained voice. "You wouldn't let me touch you." He sits on the bed again, rubbing one hand over his thigh, watching the hairs move and crinkle. "I… You used to do that. Then. We weren't always like this. This…" he snorts. "This easy."

"You said I never hurt you," Dean says, leaning against the dresser's edge, his hands closing hard on the wood. He doesn't think it's smart to be too close to Sam right now. He doesn't know if that means strangle or fuck, but either way, some distance seems in order.

"No," Sam agrees. "You didn't. Not…not like that. You just…. It was like a _job_ to you, man. Like…a duty. Except it wasn't. Obviously. But that was how you made it seem. What you would tell yourself. How you would…be…with me."

"I don't get it."

Sam doesn't look him in the eye once, but he tells Dean everything. Every little broken thing. Ugly…so much ugliness and pain, the two of them hurting each other and themselves, being hurt, being broken. Their mother, gone, dead. Murdered. Their father, gone, and by the same source. Sam leaving. Leaving _him_. Jess…

He doesn't even remember Sam, let alone this Jess; it shouldn't hurt so much to find there was someone else, someone Sam loved. Someone that Sam would have married. It shouldn't even matter, given that Sam's here with Dean now, needing him, wanting him, loving him. When push came to shove, Sam came with him and then came after him. And even now, when he's blank and empty and no longer who or what he once was, Sam's still here.

But that's all bullshit. That's all brain-talk. 

The truth is it _does_ hurt, like a sucker punch, unexpected and throbbing.

"I need to go outside," he says, when Sam winds down, hoarse and shaky-voiced. He pushes off the dresser, his knuckles aching from being wrapped tautly around the edge.

"Dean—" Sam makes to jump up again, but Dean waves him down.

"I'm not leaving," he says, scratching a hand through his hair. "I just… I'm going to go outside for a while. Okay?"

Sam swallows hard and that terror is still lingering in his eyes, but he nods. "Okay."

***

Dean brushes the snow off the banister of the porch and sits down on the cold, wet wood, letting his ass go numb and wishing he could do the same to his brain. Sam's said a lot of things about him over the last couple days, hiding out here, but he's never once given Dean the impression that he's the thinker of their particular dynamic. He's not a thinker. He doesn't need a memory to know that.

He can't think about Sam too much. It's too new, too much. The doubled edges of want and fear cut too deep and leave him bleeding and confused. So many things he doesn't remember. So many pieces that don't fit.

He palmed the pictures and shoved them into his coat pocket when he put it on. He takes them out and fans them out like a hand of cards. Sam had others in his luggage, including a pretty recent Polaroid of him and Dean when they're old enough for Dean to recognize them both. They're sitting on the Impala's hood in stained tank tops and jeans and Dean's arm is slung around Sam's neck and Sam is leaning into him. They're both grinning like loons.

 _That was Mexico. You were so drunk when they took this…hell, we both were. Blown out of our fucking minds. We were just…_ Sam shakes his head and Dean has to nudge him with his shoulder to start him up again. _Happy. We were just really happy, man._

Dean could stand to remember happy.

And maybe he would…if Valeri hadn't electrocuted it right out of his brain.

And that…that should be an answer, yeah? The same answer he gave Sam when Sam asked, _where are you going?_

Because it doesn't matter so much if Sam is his brother or if he's really fucking Sam—well, he supposes he is _now_ —or what Sam's angle is in all this. Sam he can figure out later. But Dr. Valeri…she didn't just do this to him.

He thinks of the ward, full of the screaming, the disoriented, the broken and the mad. He thinks of wrists like his, bruised and scratched up from fighting the restraints, and shaved heads that bear round burns the size of electrodes. The thinks of the bruises still unfaded on his arms, centered around scabbed up holes where they'd poured in horror and pain and pleasure in unequal measure until he doesn't even recognize his own fucking brother. Until he doesn't even remember who he _is_.

And he's not the only one. 

Valeri will keep doing it, over and over again, churning out more zombies like him with the nerve cut out of them.

Unless someone stops her.


	9. Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time here  
> All but means nothing  
> Just shadows that move across the wall  
> They keep me company  
> But they don't ask of me  
> They don't say nothing at all
> 
> Leave me be, I don't want to argue  
> I'd just get confused and I'd come all undone  
> If I agree, well, it's just to appease you  
> 'Cause I don't remember what we're fighting for  
> "Time" by Sarah McLachlan

Dean knows he's been outside for the better part of an hour but Sam doesn't look like he's moved at all, elbows on his knees hands twisted together between them. He just looks up as Dean comes in and waits. Not even a question in his eyes; he's just waiting, braced, for whatever Dean has to say.

"I have to go back," Dean says and Sam's eyes close, his hands turn white-knuckled and taut. "Somebody… You said we were here for a job. That there was something…bad in the town. I don't think you can get much worse than what she did to me. What she's done to all of us. Somebody's got to stop her."

Sam's eyes open again and they're dazzling, more green than brown. "Somebody?" Sam asks. His tone is careful. So is the look he's giving Dean, and Dean remembers a little of the fear he felt on first meeting Sam, recalls the feeling that Sam is and can be dangerous.

Dean shrugs. "You say this is what we used to do. What we do," he corrects, seeing the flicker in Sam's eyes. Past tense again. Also dangerous, if in different ways.

"We fight against _supernatural_ threats," Sam argues. "There's nothing to suggest Dr. Valeri is anything other than a particularly vicious _human_ woman."

"And? So?"

"So…we're not killers, Dean."

Dean blinks, staring at him. Then, when he realizes Sam is serious: "I don't get you!" Dean throws up his hands. "I mean…they told you I was _dead_! They…they _stole_ me, and they tied me down and…and drugged me and half-drowned me and fucking _fried_ me and you want to just _let them get away with it?_ Like…it's just okay with you?"

"No, of course it's not okay! But what do you want to do? Go in there guns blazing and take out everyone who looks at us cross-eyed?"

"Yes!" Dean hisses. "No," he amends, because he does and he doesn't. He wants them to pay, that's for sure. They should pay. But he thinks Sam said something true there—he's not a killer. Not an indiscriminate one. Not for the joy of killing—hurting—someone. That's what Valeri does. There's got to be a line in the sand between him and her.

"It's not safe there, Dean. I mean…it's just the two of us and you don't even remember…" Dean's jaw tightens and Sam falters. "We can call the police," he offers instead. "Report her."

"According to you, the police are helping her!"

"Then we report her to someone else. The FBI, maybe."

Dean's eyebrows furrow. He didn't exactly expect Sam to leap up and say, 'let's go!', but he didn't really expect this kind of blind stubbornness either. "And they're going to investigate…based on what? An anonymous tip?" Dean scoffs. "Even if they do investigate, they'll send some low-level flunky who'll go, talk with the local fuzz, make nice and dismiss it all as bullshit."

"You don't know that," Sam says, but it's half-hearted and neither one of them really believes it. Something's flickering in the back of Sam's eyes and Dean thinks that maybe if he knew Sam a little better he might know what it is, might be able to figure out why Sam's dragging his heels so much, but that's just another thing Valeri stole from him. And that just makes him angrier.

"It's not just me, Sam. They didn't do this just to me. And…and they're not going to _stop_ with me. And that's why I have to go back. Why I am." Dean shrugs and it hurts to bring the words out, but he guesses by now he can handle a little pain. "And… Half this stuff is mine, right? You don't have to come. I don't _need_ you to come with me."

Sam sucks in a breath and his eyes fall down to his hands again, still clenched so hard Dean wonders if Sam's going to end up with finger shaped bruises. "Dean—" he breathes, softer than even his gasp of a moment ago. Then, "Do you _want_ me to go with you?"

 _Yes_ , Dean wants to say, swift and unequivocal, but that's a little too raw for him. So instead, he jokes, "You look pretty vicious with that gun; who wouldn't want back-up?"

Sam laughs, shaky and weak and Dean realizes he's scared. "Yeah." He looks up at Dean then. "If you're going, I'm going with you. I'm not… I wouldn't just leave. I'm with you wherever you go."

Dean nods slowly. Tries not to look so relieved. "Okay."

***

"So tell me. Tell me everything about why we were here."

Sam nods stiffly and pulls out the journal again, extracting a wad of newspaper and cheap motel stationery from between the pages. As they spread them out over the scar-topped table, Dean again gets a creepy thrill down his spine at the sight of his own handwriting spelling out sentences he doesn't recall.

"I… I have dreams," Sam admits, his forefinger tracing the journal's worn edge back and forth. "Visions. I see…things that are going to happen."

Dean keeps his face still, neutral, despite lingering skepticism. After Sam's little display before, he's not sure what to believe anymore. He doesn't know if watching someone levitate a beer bottle or call and dismiss a spirit means he's automatically signed up for UFO abductions and Stonehenge fairy rings too or whether there's some line of credibility he just doesn't understand yet. 

Apparently, Dean needs to work harder on his poker face, though, because Sam takes one look at him, sighs, and rakes a hand through his hair making it an even bigger mess than before. "You're just going to have to take my word for it, okay?" he says tiredly and Dean feels guilty yet again. "I started having dreams about…about this. About Asher's Grove and…and the mines. Something in the mines."

_Darkness. And at its heart, a sullen glow, like banked fire, red and orange and molten, rotten white. Something moves in it, indistinct and scuttling, with a sound like tapping fingernails on bone._

_They took me down into the dark…_

"I think…" he says, before he can call it back. Sam looks at him and Dean closes his eyes, unable to recapture the thought, the feeling of it, with that gaze on him. "I think I remember that. I mean…"

He doesn't know. It's fading already, leaving only a vague stench like sulfur and the trembly resurgence of his all-too-familiar sense of barely contained panic, black and creeping. Deliberately, he opens his fisted hands and lets the cold tabletop absorb the clammy sweat from his palms. He shrugs and opens his eyes again. "It's gone."

Sam shakes his head, only a little jerky. "Doesn't matter," he says. He pushes a newspaper article towards Dean. "So I started having these dreams and we started looking for anything…funky happening in mining towns."

"Funky?" Dean raises his eyebrow. "Is that a technical term?"

Sam smiles, genuine and warm and Dean's glad he could lighten a little of the tension from Sam's face. He's the one that put it there, after all. Dean glances at the clipping Sam shoved at him—only glances—and feels suddenly cold; so cold he thinks there might be ice cubes floating in his veins. His fingers shake a little as he focuses on the picture, putting his fingers over it to block out the wild, heavy mane of hair so he can see the bones of the face undistracted.

Sam looks at him—seen from the periphery of Dean's vision, because now he's seen her face, Dean can't make himself look away—and asks, "Dean, what is it?"

"I… I know her." The eyes are different. Of course; the ones he remembers are dull and scared, sort of shell-shocked and nothing like those of the girl in the picture. He wonders if that's what Sam sees looks at him—faded and terrified. "Not _know_ , really. But she was there. At the hospital." He shrugs. Like it doesn't matter. Like he doesn't feel nauseous at the proof that it _isn't_ just him they've done this to. "She…" He takes a breath, tight with the helpless rage roiled up with that same sense of sickness. "They said she left." He looks at Sam. "She didn't leave, though, did she? Not…not upright." The force of his anger surprises him, making him slam his fist into the table so hard the journal falls off and he feels it all the way in his shoulder. "F… _fuck_!"

"Dean, there's nothing you could have done."

"You don't think I know that?" Dean snaps, before he thinks about it. His arms vibrate, his hands are fisted so hard. "Evil, evil, _evil_ fucking bitch!" He hits the table twice more and then his knuckles are bleeding and it doesn't even hurt at all. "How many, do you think?" he asks finally, furious. "How many people do you think she's killed, pretending it's science, pretending it's _medicine_?"

Sam spreads his hands, helpless. "I don't know."

Dean's teeth clench hard. Something's been bothering him. Something he said or Sam did, just within this conversation… "What…what if they're connected?" he asks suddenly.

Sam frowns at him. "What if _what's_ connected?"

"The…" Dean flaps a hand at the article, the journal. " _thing_ in the mine and Dr. Valeri. What if they're related?" Sam sort of squints at him and Dean feels impatient again. "You said there was something evil in the town. We have this…psycho b… _bitch_ of a doctor torturing and killing people for her own amusement and no one's stepped in and said, 'hey lady, this isn't cool'. Doesn't that sound a little weird to you?"

Sam starts paging through the journal. "You mean like Dr. Ellicott in Rockford?"

Dean rolls his eyes. "I have no idea if I mean like Dr. Ellicott or not. But…what if they _are_ related? Something…I don't know…controlling her or inside her. Is that even possible?"

"Yeah." Sam shrugs a shoulder, considering. "Yeah, it really is. I… It makes sense, I guess. I mean, it would make sense—that's why they came after each of us when they did. Right after we each visited the mine…which I'm going to kill you for, when you get your memory back, by the way."

Dean grins. "Not really much of an incentive, is it there, Sammy?" He pauses and thinks about what Sam said. "Wait. When were you at the mine? If we both were up at the mine, how come only I ended up in the hospital? Why'd you think I was dead?"

Sam shakes his head. "We were there different times. We'd split up."

Dean waits a beat. And another. And another. Then, when it becomes obvious Sam isn't going to say any more, " _And?_ "

Sam shrugs. His roving finger is bending the edge of the journal now, an agitated back and forth. "I was at the library, trying to figure things out. Do research. You got bored." He smiles, but it's more a movement of his lips than anything genuine. It's awful and Dean wonders how Sam ever scams anyone if he's this transparent. "You get bored. You said you were going to go get some supplies, talk to some people, get the lay of the land." Sam looks down, his mouth crooking. "I made you promise you wouldn't go up to the mine without me, but you aren't… You're not always good about things like that." He squints sort of apologetically.

Dean doesn't know what to say to that, so he elects to say nothing.

Sam sighs. "Anyway, we were supposed to meet up at the diner near the motel. Except you didn't show up."

Dean manages to wait a whole minute this time before he bursts out: "Sam, I _know_ that. If I'd showed up, we wouldn't be here now. C'mon."

Another sigh, almost identical to the first. "And then the sheriff came in and told me there'd been an accident up at the mine and you were…"

"Dead," Dean says flatly when Sam falters, drawing Sam's eyes up. Sam's look is the same as in the bed—wild and slightly insane—and Dean struggles to soften his irritation. It's not Sam's fault he's so brain-damaged he can't remember all this. "Except I'm not, Sammy," Dean reminds him quietly. "I'm right here. Right in front of you."

"Yeah." Sam's mouth makes a nervous quirk sideways, unhappy, but the line of his shoulders relaxes. He shreds the edge of the article with his fingernails, tearing off confetti sized pieces. "Yeah."

The silence is shorter this time and Sam goes on without any prompting from Dean. 

"There had been…problems up at the mine before," he says, sorting through another bundle of articles, printouts from microfiche. "Fires, clouds of poison gas. It's why they were abandoned. So the sheriff… He showed me the body… _a_ body. He said it was you. And he gave me your amulet. Just that. Just your amulet. He said…he said everything else was too badly burned. And I just… I couldn't feel anything." He swallows, hard enough Dean can hear it. "Not then."

"Well, it was a lie, right?" Sam's voice cracks a little when he starts up again; when his eyelashes flicker up enough for Dean to get a glimpse of his eyes, they look red, irritated. "When I actually…got up and started thinking about it…it had to be a lie." He ticks a finger at Dean's necklace. "You'd never take that off. Not on your own. And it wasn't burned. Not even smudged. And the strap wasn't broken."

"So…you started investigating," Dean pushes again. It feels a little girly to put his hand over Sam's or anything like that but Dean is conscious of the desire to touch Sam. It's only gotten worse—stronger—since Sam fucked him. He wants to touch Sam at all these odd moments and has to stop himself all the time. He's not clingy. He's not going to be clingy. He's not That Guy.

So instead, he slouches down in the chair a little and pushes his foot so that his ankle intersects Sam's. Sam doesn't say anything, his expression doesn't change, but after a moment his leg presses hard against Dean's, matching tension, bones rubbing.

"I didn't. I still didn't think you were alive at that point." Sam's tongue swipes at his lip and Dean sees blood bead up behind it, shocking red against pink. "It was just… I wanted to hurt them. I wanted revenge." Dean shivers a little when Sam says that. Not because Sam sounds like him; Dean's anger is all fire and blazing brightness. Sam's voice is cold. Tight. It's a promise, not a threat. "You were dead. You were dead and they had done something to you and I was _alone_."

The skin on the back of Dean's neck prickles with momentary cold at Sam's voice, the plunging black depths he manages to put in that one word: _alone._ Not that it takes much; Dean has his own issues—maybe a whole subscription—with it, _alone_. Sometimes it feels like it echoes off the spaces inside his skull, louder now that there _is_ Sam and he has something that is the very opposite of alone.

"I went up to the mine," Sam says after a minute and now he's trying to scratch his way through the table with just the one fingernail. The rasp of it is about to drive Dean…( _not crazy. Not crazy_ ) It's irritating. But Dean lets that go too. This is his fault. He did this to Sam. "I didn't even get that far before they attacked me. The sheriff, some other people I didn't know. God. They were so strong. I almost didn't get away. I had to shoot one of them."

"Ah." Dean doesn't know why he says it, other than it seems like Sam's looking for _some_ kind of response.

Sam looks up and yeah, his eyes _are_ red. "Flesh wound," he offers, as if Dean had asked. His leg flexes against Dean, like he's trying to wring everything he can out of that brief contact. "I…" Sam blots his lip with a fingertip and looks at the resulting smudge of blood. After a moment, he shrugs and wipes it on his jeans. His shoulders are tight again, bowed in.

"Sam," Dean says this time to mean _you don't have to_ and Sam shakes his head.

"Might as well finish it," Sam answers and shrugs. "I hid out. Half the fucking town's abandoned anyway, folks moving out, folks disappearing. And I started following the sheriff around. Overheard him talking about you. About us. And whether I knew you were up at Arcadia and how much trouble would I be. And that's when I knew you were alive. That they'd had you…all that time." 

Dean hates the way Sam's looking at him, like when all this started, like he's a ghost. "But you got me out, Sam," Dean reminds him. "And I'm _fine._ "

Sam looks at him and Dean sees Sam's answer in his eyes, clearly and starkly written enough for even an amnesiac to read: _But you're not fine, Dean. Not until you're_ my _Dean again._

It's Dean who looks away first, the back of his throat and tongue feeling sour and sort of metallic. He knows that's the thought that's holding Sam together through all of this: that somehow, through enough research or skull-cracking or whatever, he'll be able to fix Dean again. Make him into the person he used to be. 

Dean doesn't want to think about what will happen if it doesn't work; whether Sam will break or whether Sam will just leave him, either option just as sucktastic.

"Yeah." Sam visibly gathers himself but his tone is even enough, almost normal. "Okay, so let's say for a minute that they _are_ related. That Dr Valeri is either the evil I was sensing or she's working for it, feeding off, getting off on her patients fear and pain." Sam's hand moves to touch Dean's knee lightly and Dean finds out that his knee is somehow hardwired straight to his dick. Or maybe that's just Sam. "How do we stop it, or stop her?"

"It started with the mine," Dean answers, flipping Sam's pen between his fingers idly. "I say we blow it up and see if that doesn't fix the damn thing. I mean…it’s a mining town…it can't be that hard to get our hands on some explosives, right?"

Sam grins tiredly. "Dean, we can _make_ explosives."

Dean finds an answering smile spreading over his face. That's so cool. "So there _are_ perks to being a Winchester. Why didn't you say so?"

"Silly me, I thought fucking me was a big enough perk all on its own. I should have remembered; no comparison to blowing some shit up in the Dean Handbook of Living."

"Wait." Dean closes his fingers over Sam's wrist. Sam looks startled and then slightly wary. "You mean we can't do _both_?"

Sam's face lightens immediately and he laughs before grabbing the back of Dean's neck and pulling him halfway across the table to plaster their mouths together. The table's edge is jammed sort of uncomfortably in his diaphragm but Sam's happiness and the warm, practiced pressure of his mouth make up for it. Dean reaches for him and without really breaking free—thank God Sam's as tall as he is—Sam gets up and comes around to slide one leg over and sit across Dean's lap.

Sam's really warm for someone who's always bitching about being cold and he tastes like that oily coffee and the sweet breath mints he carries around. He's solid and his hair keeps surprising Dean with its softness and he's rocking their dicks together, making deep pleading sounds in Dean's mouth and Jesus, it's good. Dean arches up and tries to bring Sam down more, deeper into him.

Finally, there's no more air between them and Sam pulls back, gasping and hard against Dean's erection. "Dean," he says, and Dean finds it really hard to concentrate when Sam's mouth is all swollen and wet like that, "what…what are we going to do if blowing up the mine doesn't stop her?"

Anger—fire of a different kind, just as scorching—makes him clench and ache and he feels his face harden. "Then we kill the bitch."

Sam hesitates and then nods. "Okay."

***

"Dean?" Sam says a little later. He's muffled by Dean's neck, sucking busily at the skin so it stings and throbs and Dean knows he'll have more bruises tomorrow, these in the shape of Sam's lips.

In revenge, he runs both sets of fingertips lightly down the warm, naked skin of Sam's back, scraping with just the merest hint of nail. Sam bucks hard against him and moans, his breath huffing hotly against Dean's throat. "Yeah?"

"I want you to fuck me." Sam pulls back—which only brings his cock harder against Dean's—his hands balanced on Dean's shoulders like he expects Dean to lurch up and away. "I… Is that okay?"

Dean laughs. He can't help it; Sam looks so damn _earnest_ , grinding in Dean's lap in ways that drains all the blood from his brain and distracting him with the snake-shimmy of his flat stomach against Dean's. It's fucked up that he should be able to do things like this with his body and still look so damned _innocent_. Then he thinks about what Sam's asking and he can only bury his face against Sam's collarbone and breathe in the effort to not come.

"Dean?" Sam's fingers card through Dean's growing stubble, making him shiver and tilt up into the touch.

"Yeah," he says and does he always sound this high-pitched? "Yeah, Sam, we can do that."

"Here," Sam says, his teeth nipping at Dean's earlobe. He follows with a slow, wet swish of his tongue over the same bit of skin. At the same time, he thumbs over Dean's nipple and Dean jumps. Sam smiles against Dean's skin, tickling. "Like this. In the chair."

Dean swallows, loud enough to be heard. "Yeah, Sam. Okay." Should he say more? Is there any more to be said about it, except maybe, 'get naked now, please thank you'? He splays his hand across the small of Sam's back and with the other tugs at Sam's belt. Sam makes this impossible arc with his spine and bends to turn his attentions to a spot between Dean's shoulder and neck.

"Dean," Sam murmurs, and Dean shudders at the sound of his voice, deep and growling and hungry. "Dean…"

"I'm here," Dean answers, ripping the belt out of the loops and tossing it somewhere. "I'm right here."

Sam breathes in sharply; his hand cup around Dean's head, bending Dean's head back so that he can bite harder, suck more firmly, moaning under his breath. Dean groans and pulls Sam tighter against him. Sam's opened zipper bites into his skin. The rest of Sam feels pretty damn good.

"Off," Dean says roughly. "Get your pants off."

First Sam almost falls, sliding off Dean's legs; only Dean's quick grab saves him. Then he nearly breaks a leg wrestling hastily out of his jeans. Dean tears his own belt open, fumbles with the zipper and fly and lifts his hips to skim it all down around his ankles. Then he reaches for Sam's flailing wrist.

"Wait…" Sam says, hopping out of the puddle of his pants and tugging away. "Wait." He goes to their luggage and Dean watches him, the smooth interplay of muscle, the miles of sleek skin broken only occasionally by the paler marks of scar tissue. He didn't really _look_ at anybody when he was in the hospital. No one except the doctors, the orderlies, and then only to try and intuit what was on their face, what expression was going to cause him pain. Nothing like this, looking simply for the pleasure of looking, the joy of _seeing_. 

"Ha!" Sam straightens up with the bottle of lube looking extraordinarily pleased with himself and catches Dean staring. Dean looks away quickly, but he knows he's been caught. Sam pads across the floor—still absurdly in his white socks—and comes to Dean's side. Sam's free hand snakes under Dean's chin and tips his face back. Dean's face feels hot and he focuses on Sam's nose, Sam's mouth, the mole on his left cheek. "Dean." Sam's fingers tighten a little and he slides one leg over Dean's again to perch on Dean's thighs. "You can look at me if you want to. You can look all you want."

Dean shakes his head a little and Sam leans forward to brush his mouth over Dean's. Light. Feather light. And then his tongue is sliding between Dean's lips, opening Dean's mouth and delving inside. Dean palms the spur of Sam's shoulder, trails across Sam's pectoral, feels the nipple harden and peak under his palm amid plains of goose bumps. Down the soft-hard washboard of his abs and down to finally wrap around the length of Sam's cock.

Sam's whole body twitches and sways into Dean; his moan is almost inaudible, but Dean feels it resonate through his bones. Sam's hands cup Dean's face; he bites and suckles Dean's bottom lip and then pulls back a little. "I'll do you, you do me."

Dean doesn't understand until Sam grabs his hand and coats it thickly in the clear gel then guides it around to Sam's ass. Dean's slick fingers skim across Sam's opening and Sam makes a soft hiss, hands tightening on Dean's skin. "Yes," he whispers and bends his head again to assault Dean's throat with his mouth, teeth and tongue. As Dean breaches him, Sam makes a quiet hitching, moaning noise and his hand creeps between them to wrap around Dean's cock, spreading warmed gel over him and making him arch up into Sam's grip.

"Dean," Sam whispers and it's not a pain-sound or protest; his body opens and rides down on Dean's hand like it's the most natural thing ever. Like it's just what he's been waiting for all this time.

This is weird too, stroking inside Sam, feeling him pulse and cling, tight and hot. Not because it's unfamiliar, but because it feels almost _too_ familiar. He crooks his finger a certain way and Sam jumps and whimpers, teeth closing hard over Dean's shoulder. Dean closes his eyes and lets it take him, quasi-memory, body instinct. Sam curls and gasps, fucking himself on Dean, his face hidden and his quiet noises muffled by the curve of Dean's throat.

"Another," Sam murmurs a little later, still sliding his fingers up and down Dean's shaft in slick, wet, delicious friction. It's too slow for Dean to come, but his hips keep making shivering little bucks and tension coils in his stomach, winding tighter and tighter. A part of him thinks they could do this forever, him inside of Sam, Sam's hand around his cock; another part thinks he'll die if he doesn't get to come soon, preferably in the same smooth heat his fingers are buried in.

On the next slide, Dean adds another finger and Sam arches up with a moan that's almost a sigh. Sam's thumb makes sharp agitated patterns over the head of Dean's cock, slurring over the slit and it's Dean's turn to whimper, biting down on Sam's collarbone. "Another," Sam says again and Dean knows it's too soon, Sam isn't stretched enough, but Sam kisses him, slow and devouring and Dean does it, making sure on every pass to finger over the place in Sam that makes him shake and moan to ease the burn.

"Dean," Sam says finally, urgently, and he doesn't have to say anything else. 

Dean takes his fingers away and Sam pushes up, strong thighs flexing and maneuvers to sink down onto Dean's cock as Dean guides him down. He has about a second to wonder if it's ironic or just a statement that what he remembers best and most are things like this, the searing, silken grasp of Sam's body, the feel and weight of a gun. Hunting and fucking, the things that go to the bone. Then Sam's enclosing him and he has no thought at all that's not _Sammy._

"Sam," he chokes, holding onto Sam's hips and easing the slide as Sam takes him in. "God, Sam…" He feels so full, so swollen as if he could break Sam apart over him. He thrusts up sharply and Sam continues his slow arc down and they impact. The noises they make sound the same, muffled by lips and tongue.

"You can go hard," Sam whispers back between frantic bites and licks. His eyes look glazed, wild; he leans back so his weight is mostly supported by Dean's hands and his grip on Dean's shoulder. Sam's breath catches at a certain arc and his eyes half-lid, pink tongue chasing the wet plumped curve of his lip. "Please. I… It's okay. I can go hard."

Dean groans, Sam rocks and Dean thrusts and like that, it's a rhythm, hard and slamming. It's like falling into something, like the gun in his hand, heavy and portentous. And Dean remembers this, or thinks he does, digging his thumbs into Sam's hips and tilting so that his cock grinds deep inside Sam at an angle that makes Sam dig his nails into Dean's skin and say his name like a prayer in between hoarse gasping growls.

"C'mon, SamSammy _baby_ ," Dean says back, babbling just as bad. "You feel so good around me; c'mon, I want you to. Just…c'mon. I got you, Sammy; it's okay. Just want to feel you. Just let me feel you…" It's nothing that would have occurred to him to say and everything he wants to as Sam fucks down and he fucks up and the chair groans and creaks until Dean wonders if they're both going to end up ass-out on the floor. Sam's head falls back, exposing the long glistening line of his throat and if it wouldn't totally fuck up the rhythm, Dean would bite him hard right there, where neck becomes the strong shape of Sam's jaw. Dean switches his grip to one hand spread over Sam's arching back and the other to grip Sam's ass, dragging him in and closer and down and tighter and oh _fuck_ … "Sam. _Sam…_ " 

He can't quite make it; Sam flexes hard, undulates his whole body and does something deep inside that scrambles Dean's brain and dick in one move. Dean's comes, spurting deep and sliding slick, blackness hovering at the edge of his vision and weighting his eyes. He can't quite stop though, wanting this, to crawl inside this moment and make himself at home; he's nearly soft but still thrusting when Sam finally cries out and clenches even tighter, spilling his own come between their joined bodies in hot shuddering pulses. Dean wipes his hands through it and brings it to his mouth, tasting Sam and salt and sweat on his fingertips and it's familiar and it's _right_ and it's like home after all.

Sam collapses on him, limp and wrung out, shaking in aftershocks. Dean puts his arms around Sam and holds him even though his legs are starting to go numb. His ass already _is_ numb and his thighs feel loose and unsteady as noodles. It doesn't matter. It's trivial. Instead, he pets the long trail of Sam's spine off-center, far enough to bury his fingers in the damp mess of hair on Sam's nape and then back down to the curve of Sam's ass and lets himself remember what it's like to have a body, warm and breathing, in his arms. Sam makes an indistinguishable noise and turns his face so his lips feather against Dean's neck in soundless whispers that almost tickle.

"I'll be yours," Dean says suddenly, his voice no more steady than his legs as he tries to get the words out. "Even if I'm not… If I can't… I'll be yours. If you want."

Sam smiles—Dean can feel it spread across his skin—and he gives Dean one tired kiss just behind his ear. "Until the wheels fall off," Sam agrees.

"Bed?" Dean suggests hopefully. He's not sure he can move Sam on his own. He's not totally sure he can _move_.

"Oh, yes please," Sam says, and then they're disentangling and pulling away and Dean has to remind himself it's only for a moment. When he gets up, Sam thrusts his hand into Dean's and smiles and Dean smiles back as Sam tugs him towards the bed.

***

"I don't want you to go," Sam whispers later—much later—against the knob of his spine and Dean opens his eyes, pulled back from the melting edge of sleep.

"Why?" 

Against his back, Sam startles and he realizes he was never meant to hear that; that Sam probably thought he was asleep.

Sam shifts, warm and slow and his arm around Dean's waist tugs tight, pulling them more snugly together until Dean doesn't think there's an inch of skin between them that doesn't touch. "Because I almost lost you there," Sam says finally. "I thought I had. And it felt like dying. And I can't… I don't need you to be him. I don't want you to be here because…because of me. Because you feel grateful or obligated or…or trapped. But I can't lose you, Dean. Not you. Not you too."

"Sam—"

"No." Sam's face tucks between Dean's shoulder and the pillow; his eyelashes tickle against the skin. His leg tightens where it's twined through Dean's. "I don't want to talk about it. That's not… You're just everything I have. That's all."

And Dean thinks he shouldn't feel so grateful for that. But he does. Because Sam's all he has, all that tethers him to the person he was before and even if he thinks Sam got the shit end of the deal, it's almost as good as a promise. Because as bad as being crazy was, it was worse to be alone.


	10. Endless Dream

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So don't be afraid  
> Your heart is in me  
> And it's racing so fast now  
> Cause everything we ever were or ever will be  
> Is shapeless as a changing cloud  
> Your letter written on the sky  
> I'm needing now to read it through my eyes  
> When you see just what I see  
> Then tenderly watch it change  
> And just let it be
> 
> Cause I am like a dream  
> And you are just a trip that I am on  
> When the trip is over I will go back  
> To the places that I once belonged  
> And I will look for comfort there  
> And when I do I know it will be gone  
> That is when I'll dream a dream  
> Where I am you and you are me  
> And then I'll know your love  
> "Endless Dream" by Conjure One feat. Poe

The entrance of the mine is flooded in a thin, vile layer of tobacco brown water that swishes dirtily around their boots. It smells like old, expended metal, like a corroded penny, and—until the shaft curves—the bitter ice-laden wind blows straight through them, cutting like razors on any bits of exposed skin and making Dean's jacket feel like it's only a windbreaker.

The floor of the shaft rises a little bit after the curve, and the flood turns to nasty colored puddles, slippery slick stone and rusty, dangerous splinters of metal and stone. It's only a few hundred yards before they come to a hole in floor large enough to accommodate them and their gear.

Dean holds the light and the gun while Sam sets up the tripod and hand-winch. Sam's hair, shoulder and pack are spotted with water and something about it, about the almost-shapes it makes prompts Dean to say, "I used to draw…protection symbols. On your clothes, on your backpack and stuff. In salt water."

Sam pauses and looks up at him, shifting his hard hat back on his head so the light doesn't shine right in Dean's eyes. "Did you?" His eyes flicker and then he goes back to what he was doing, hands moving fast and efficient as he screws the lightweight but durable frame together. He says, "I know you used to hide things…rabbit's feet and _gris-gris_ and things in my stuff. Used to drive me _crazy_. I didn't know about the salt water though."

Dean looks past Sam, down the darkness of the shaft, his fingers clammy around the pistol's grip. "Maybe I don't remember. Maybe it's not real."

Sam glances over his shoulder again and there's a faint smile at the corners of his mouth. "No, it sounds like something you'd do." Sam pauses and sits back on his heels, hands cupped around his knees. "It's the last time I'll say anything, but it's not too late, Dean. We can still leave. Go and just…not look back."

Dean shakes his head jerkily, as if that possibility hasn't occurred to him a half-dozen times already. 

Sam is the one that knows how to do this, who remembers, who _gets it_. Sam is the one that escaped once already. The gun felt familiar and easy when it was shooting at cans and bottles in the snow, but he doesn't know if it'll be the same when it matters—when it's a moving target and out to get you first. And while he's scared for his own life (of course he is), he's also conscious that if he gets in trouble, Sam will try to save him. At the expense of his own life. Or both their lives. And it'll be his fault. For not being good enough. For letting himself be broken to uselessness. And he'll either be dead or alone, which is just about the same thing.

_So just don't get into trouble, Dean._

"Naw," he says and Sam breathes out, but starts hooking the belt around his waist, shrugging into the harness. "Can't run out on a hunt. That doesn't sound like the Winchester Way."

Sam's smile is unwilling and half-angry. "No. No, it really isn't."

***

The winze drops them down about a hundred feet. It's warmer and drier, which is about all that can be said about it. Their feet crunch in dust and debris as they swing their lanterns and flashlights wide, shoulders flat against each other, Dean aiming up-shaft and Sam sighting down.

"Is this the part where I say it's quiet and then you say it's _too quiet_ and then something comes to eat our faces?" Dean asks. God help him, he sounds almost hopeful. There's a certain solidity to something coming to eat your face. It's not this nerve-wracking _waiting_ for the bad stuff to start happening.

Sam's shoulders move against his as he laughs soundlessly. "Sometimes?"

"Ah. Just checking." 

"For example, not today, it would seem."

Dean nods. "So. If _I_ was some sort of evil, mind-controlling mine-dwelling thing, where would I be?"

There is the rustle of cloth and nylon and then the whine of a zipper. Taking his eyes off his side of the mine drift, Dean glances at Sam to see him rummaging through his backpack. "That's a good question," Sam says, his right arm, gun in hand, still extended. He takes out a billow of thin onion colored paper, fighting to get it open. Carefully and without taking his eyes off the darkness, Dean puts his lantern down—but not his gun—and together they spread the mine schematic out so Sam can read it. "It's only a guess," Sam says thoughtfully, "but looking at the pattern of the excavation against when the fires started and the mines became 'dangerous', I'm thinking it's probably somewhere in this fourth level down here." He points. "Somewhere in this western part, where they started to slope down, dig deeper. That was the newest and most viable part of the cut and it's the part that got abandoned first."

Dean shrugs. "Makes sense. So we've got to get down…what? Another two levels and maybe…" He squints, trying to translate the scale. "Another half-mile of tunnel or so?"

"Just about." Sam nods. "Maybe we can find another drop shaft down." 

They both study the map a few minutes longer, memorizing turns and passages before Sam folds it back up one-handed, tucks it in his backpack and zips it all up. Dean picks up the lantern again and flexes his outstretched arm. The elbow and shoulder ache a little, stiff in the places where he's hurt them before. Dimly, he has a snatch of something large and furry in the dark, in some woods, picking him up by the one arm and shaking him. He remembers the dull red throb of the bone slipping out of the socket. He remembers its eyes, silver and inhuman, gleaming in the dark.

"Dean?" 

Dean startles a little under his skin, sort of lost in sense-memory, but he doesn't let it show. "Yeah?" He turns his head again to look at Sam.

Sam puts his own light down to reach out and grab the back of Dean's neck and tug him in. The kiss is hard and frantic, more a rough scrape of lips and teeth and urgent tongue, and when Sam pulls away, they both immediately re-sight down their respective sides of the drift to make sure nothing's snuck up on them in the interim. "I love you," Sam says, looking away. "I… I just love you, Dean."

"Um. Yeah, okay." Dean thinks he might love Sam too and he feels pretty confident that Dean before did or does—Christ, this is confusing—but it's also nothing he feels particularly comfortable saying. "Thanks."

Sam laughs. "It's fine, Dean; I wasn't expecting a response. I just… I don't get to say it to you very much."

"Oh, so you're taking _advantage_ of me in my amnesiac state." Dean nods wisely. "I feel so used."

"You're going to feel my foot up your ass in about half a second," Sam says back. There's a scrape on stone and the light wavers and shifts as Sam picks up his lantern again. 

"Such a kinky bastard," Dean grumbles and picks up his own light.

***

"Sam."

"Hmm?" Sam's done setting the charges and arming the timer; only seven more to go. His foot taps on the stone and Dean knows Sam's counting off turns in his mind.

"You said…" Dean turns in a slow circle, panning his light over the walls. The mineshaft's ceiling has opened up here into the original stone, rising hundreds of feet above their heads to vanish in thick darkness that even their head and hand lamps can't penetrate. It's cross-braced in several places with huge supports of pitted metal. They look like the pistons of some unknown giant machine, half-buried. "You said there'd been fires down here, right?'

"Yeah. That's when they started abandoning sections of the mine. There was a huge one; fifteen miners died on the scene, another six died from smoke inhalation and stuff. Why?"

"Well, I've been looking," Dean says, "and I don't see any soot on the walls. No fire scarring, scorch marks…nothing."

"Huh." Sam panned his light around too, making that same circle. "Weird."

"Weird?" Dean echoes. "Is there a dictionary somewhere for me to learn all these fancy ghostbusting terms? Because I'm feeling a little left out."

"We're not ghostbusters," Sam says automatically, head tipped back as he scans up as high as the light beams will go. "And what do you want me to say?"

Dean scowls. "I don't know. You're supposed to be the expert here."

Sam shrugs. "Yeah, well I don't know either. All the newspaper stuff I could dig up said there had been fires. I mean…the body the sheriff showed me was _burnt_. What was I supposed to think?"

"Hey, Sam…chill out," Dean says, putting his hand on Sam's shoulder. Under his palm, Sam's shaking a little bit. Not much, too little to notice without touching him. "I'm not blaming you, man." 

"No. I know that," Sam says. He doesn't meet Dean's eyes. 

Dean's fingers tighten over the bone. "Sam. We'll be okay. We _are_ okay. Now get your head straight."

Sam nods. "I think I'd feel better if something was attacking us by now."

Dean laughs. "Yeah, me too."

***

"Dean?" 

That's really his only warning, before Sam drops both gun and lantern, his fingers flying to his head as his legs buckle. Sam grunts like he's been hit.

"Sam?" Dean turfs his own lamp but can't quite make himself ditch the gun as he reaches out to catch his brother. And it is _catching_ Sam; he's all bones and angles and surprisingly heavy weight, doubled in bulk thanks to the backpack. They crash sideways into the stone, Dean twisting to take the brunt of the hit and cushion Sam as they slide down the wall. "Sam?"

Sam whimpers, still trying to curl up in the frame of Dean's arms, huge monkey-paw hands knocking off his hard hat and wrapping around his skull like he's trying to hold it together.

Dean hates it, but he puts the gun down carefully—and in reach of his hand—and cradles as much of Sam's body as he can, rocking him. "Sam. Come back, man. I don't know what freaky magical thing you're doing, but you need to come back now, hear me?"

He wonders what he'll do if Sam won't or doesn't come back; starts trying to figure out how he can carry Sam out of here, through and up several miles of branching tunnel. All the while, he lets his voice run on: "Sammy, c'mon, Sammy. I need you here, man. Please come back."

The terror—the old terror, the black, clotted terror of the hospital—comes back to him and he feels his heart squeeze tighter and beat too hard in his chest, the walls of the drift closing in. _He's going to die. Something's killing him and there's nothing you can do about it. Because you're weak. You're weak and you're pitiful and you fuck up everything you touch. And that's why you're alone. Why you'll always be alone._

No. Dean buries his face in Sam's hair, holds on tighter. Not alone. He's not alone.

"Dean—" Sam's hand comes up to wrap around the crown of Dean's head, holding it against his. "Keep talking," Sam says, gritty and slow. "It's not…" He whimpers again, fingers tightening over Dean's skull; Dean's arms wrap tighter still. "S'not real. It's _It_. The thing in the mine. Talk to me and I'll talk to you."

Dean's jaw clenches and a little of his anger bleeds into the cold darkness of his fear. "I'm gonna kill it," he says.

"Yes," Sam agrees, quietly, fervently.

"We're going to blow this mine to fucking hell and gone…" Dean raises his head, shoves his arms deeper under Sam's armpits, dragging Sam back against him more firmly. 

"…until there's nothing left but rubble and fucking ashes," Sam chimes in, his feet skidding in the powdery detritus of the drift as he fights to get his uncooperative legs under him. His jeans are smeared with it, like chalk. Sam's head falls back onto Dean's shoulder and he mutters, "Kill that thing; squish it like a bug and bring this whole damn mine down on top of it…"

"Yes." Dean's thighs flex and they shove themselves up, together, scraping Dean's spine and side up the uneven rocky wall until they're on their feet again, shaky and panting. Sam turns his head so his forehead touches Dean's cheek, his hair catching in Dean's stubble. Sam could probably stand on his own after that first moment but Dean leaves his arms crossed over Sam's chest for a while longer anyway. Sam pants against his neck and collarbone where his coat doesn't cover.

"What was it?" Dean asks finally.

"A vision." Sam shudders and his legs almost go out from under him again. Dean hauls him upright again. "I saw… I don't even know what I saw. A thing. A thing lying in darkness. A thing dreaming in the dark."

"It's _sleeping_?" He doesn't know why he's so surprised. Maybe because the thought of all of this, this sabotage of his life and his memory, being somehow _accidental_ is more horrifying than he can even explain. 

"Yes. Well. No. Sorta." Sam's head rolls on Dean's shoulder; he looks up at the darkness arching over them. "It…it's like it's a waking dream. Like…the dream spreads out and becomes almost real. It touches you and then you're inside the dream too. That's what happened to those miners. It… Jesus. I think it was trying to protect itself."

"Are you telling me it burned them up—killed them—with _imaginary fire_?" Dean asks. He looks up at the tunnel walls again, this time speculative. "And that's why there's no soot on the walls."

"Yeah." Sam reaches up and curls his hand around the back of Dean's skull again, below the hard hat, his thumb scrubbing against the grain of Dean's barely-there hair. "The fires, the gas, the poison…it was all the thing, keeping people away." Sam breathes out and then starts struggling up to his own feet again. Dean untangles himself from Sam reluctantly.

"So…it's not really evil at all? It's just…what? Protecting itself?"

"Oh, it's evil, all right." Sam bends carefully and retrieves his hard hat, tapping the lamp with one finger. "And it's not just protection. It…it _feeds_ off the pain and death. It enjoys it. It enjoys hurting people."

"People like Dr. Valeri?" Dean grabs his lantern and Sam's. The charges are already going; they don't have lots of time and Sam looks shaky still.

"No." Sam makes a little noise in the back of his throat Dean can't classify. Then he looks over at Dean, his helmet light shining right into Dean's eyes. "Dr. Valeri…that's something different, I think. People like you."

Dean stops. Just…stops, body and brain. And then slowly, his head comes up and he turns to look at Sam.

"I saw," Sam says hoarsely. His voice sounds like cloth nearly worn through—rotten and ready to tear at any second. The hardness in his eyes is gone too, replaced by the soft and watery helpless look Dean hates so much, his _you're broken and I can't fix you_ look. "Not everything…not nearly everything, but I saw you. What they did to you."

"Don't…" Dean says, but his voice fails him and it comes out a whisper and barely intelligible. 

_Tell me. Tell me, Dean, and all this can stop; you can make all of this stop. You just have to tell me what I want to know._

"It…it's _in_ her, somehow. Dr. Valeri. Others too. Too many others for me to count all of them. All the hospital staff for sure. All those doctors…Jesus. It uses them like…like its arms. Doing its bidding. Controlling things. Controlling the town. Enough of it, anyway. And feeding off the rest."

 _Just tell me Dean. Just a few words. A few meaningless words. Because it hurts, yes? Hurts so bad (so good). And we're just getting started. It can be worse, Dean. So much worse. No one knows you're here. No one cares. You're all alone. And you're in pain. But you can make the pain stop, Dean._ You _can do it. You just have to tell me what I want to know._

"You…" Dean clears his throat, spits into the dust where it splats, a spot of blackness. "You saw all that in just a couple minutes?" He's trying to be funny, but he can feel it fall as flat as that little gob.

Sam shrugs. "It's…it's never clear, really. It's all…impressions. Things all jumbled up and without words. Like a whole movie compressed down to a couple seconds."

"Why hasn't it attacked us? Why haven't we been hit by this…I can't believe I'm even saying this…killer dream?"

"I don't think it _can_ ," Sam says and then frowns. His eyes half-lid. "I think…I think it tried, but it can't reach us like that."

"Why not?"

Sam smiles. "Because I'm me and you're you?" He checks his gun with quick and economical efficiency and then accepts his lantern from Dean. "I have…whatever this is and you…" Sam's mouth pinches a little at the corners and Dean wonders what he's remembering, to put that look on Sam's face. "Well. It's always been hard for things to crawl inside your mind. You're pigheaded even when it comes to spooks. C'mon." He tilts his head at the tunnel in front of them. "We've still got a ways to go and more charges to set. I'll bring this whole goddamn mountain down if I have to."

"Be a pretty cool explosion," Dean offers and is rewarded by Sam's startled laugh.


	11. Whatever I Fear

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did we expect these things to change  
> By waking up and suddenly there they are  
> And all I need's a starting place  
> And nothing ever seemed so hard
> 
> Whatever I fear the most is whatever I see before me  
> Whenever I let my guard down, whatever I was ignoring  
> Whatever I fear the most is whatever I see before me  
> Whatever I have been given, whatever I have been  
> "Whatever I Fear" by Toad the Wet Sprocket

The drift slants sharply down, the cart tracks—newer than in other parts of the mine—buckled and coming loose from the rock. The cut marks on the wall are cruder, sloppy and there are fewer support beams. Dean runs a hand across the stone gingerly. "I don't understand," he says softly, not sure if he's afraid of bringing the whole shebang down on their heads or of what might overhear them. "This…this doesn't even look like they were _trying_. I mean…how could they mine anything under these kinds of conditions? The mine's not that old. You can't tell me OSHA or somebody wouldn't have had their head up the miner's asses about it."

"I don't think they were all that interested in mining by now," Sam says, poking at a chalky and melted looking pile of waste rock and coming up with a skull, brown and hollow-eyed. "Doesn't look like it, anyway. Maybe they didn't find it by accident. Maybe it was calling them."

Dean shivers. He doesn't know if the bitter cold is because they're so far underground or some byproduct of the thing lying in wait but it aches in his bones, his uncovered ears, the tip of his nose. "Calling them for what?"

"Look," Sam says and squats down, holding his lamp closer to a section of the wall formerly hidden by the loose stone. Dean comes over and hunches down too. By the conjoined light, Dean sees the rock was once carved deeply, some kind of decorative border. Dean reaches out and traces a pattern in the worn stone—it looks more deliberate than a curve or swirl, like it used to be something, man-like but not a man.

"Damn," Dean says, his breath smoking silver in the chill. "How long do you think it's _been_ down here?"

"I don't know." Sam looks worried again, eyebrows pulled in tight over his nose. "A long damn time."

"Put a charge here," Dean says. It's not structurally important, he knows, but a part of him is completely wigged by this, older than anything he's ever seen. Older than humans, maybe. "Blow it the fuck up, whatever it is."

"Yeah," Sam agrees slowly and fumbles with his bag.

***

When it comes, he never sees it coming.

There's only Sam's sudden yelp of, "Dean—" and hands coming out of the thick shadows to grab. Dean may not remember much but his instincts are just fine. He ducks and twists, feeling rough, cold fingers slither over his scalp, skid off his shoulder, his thigh.

They've got Sam.

"Dean, run!"

Their fumbling hands throw Dean off balance; he drops the lantern in a dizzying whirl of shadow and throws one hand out to catch himself on the stone, legs pistoning to carry him forward. With a half step of space between him and his attackers, Dean turns blindly and fires.

The gun muzzle flashes, throwing fractured light onto them; it's some woman he's never seen before, snaggle-haired and wild-eyed, and Rube, one of the orderlies from the hospital, a big burly bear of a man who once put out his cheap Russian cigarettes on various parts of Dean's body. Even so, he _knows_ Rube and Rube knows him; seen him naked and fucked up and screaming-crying (for the pain to stop, for the lid to open, for the air to come back into his starved and deprived lungs).

_Tell me! Tell me where he is and all of this will stop, Dean. I promise. Do you want it to stop, Dean?_

"Dean!" Sam says again, frantic, despairing and then Dean can't think about it anymore. 

_They'll kill him._

He wants to close his eyes but he can't. Not because he doesn't think he can hit them—it's point blank range and they're lunging at him again, their eyes crazed blanks of nothing human—but because if he's going to do this, really do it, he needs to have his eyes wide open. He needs to bear witness.

His first shot clips the woman in the shoulder; she jerks backwards on that side in a splash of red-black blood but keeps plunging forward at him. His second takes her right through the center of her forehead and her eyes roll back in bruised almost bluish lids as she collapses.

Rube hits him then, like the Juggernaut with a full head of momentum behind him. Dean's no lightweight but it lifts him off his feet and slams him down into the rock, Rube on top of him, tearing with dirty fingernails while Dean tries to remember how to breathe. He's wirier than Rube; he wriggles and bucks until he can get the gun shoved up under Rube's chin. Rube opens his mouth and hisses, his spit oddly dark as it drips from his teeth and onto Dean's skin. Dean fires and Rube _twitches_ , his whole body going stiff before crashing down. The crown of his head clips Dean in the chin.

There's no time for Dean to think about it; he shoves and kicks and twists his way out from under Rube. Sam. Sam needs him.

_He left you, Dean. He left you in our care. He left you to this. And if you'd only tell us where he is, we can make him pay. We can inflict on him all the pain we're now inflicting on you. So tell us, Dean. Where is he?_

"Sam!"

There are four of them dragging at Sam, whose hands are empty of his gun, whose eyes are empty of _Sam_.

No.

Dean doesn't even debate it this time; his arm comes up and the gun fires, the explosions echoing off the rock until he can't hear anything else, not even the beat of his own heart. He fires and keeps firing until it clicks down on an empty chamber. Bodies fall and Sam falls with them, leaving Dean to scramble over them and pull his brother free.

Sam comes bonelessly, blood oozing from a cut on his cheek and his eyes rolled back in his head. He twitches in rhythmic pulses, mouth open and slightly slack. "Sam—"

"Tell me where he is, Dean." The voice that comes from Sam's throat isn't Sam's. Or…it _is_ , but changed and distorted, picking up the lighter, inflexible tones of Dr. Valeri's voice. 

Dean's throat is dry. So dry. So dry it's nothing intelligible when he whispers, "Sam?"

"Tell me where your brother is, Dean."

_No._

And then he remembers where he's heard those words before.

***

_"Let me out of here, you crazy bitch!" His wrists are bleeding from fighting the cuffs; when they strapped him down, he saw his blood isn't the first to stain them. "I swear, I swear to_ God _when I get out of here I will kill you. I will kill every last one of you and burn the corpse. I will take your ashes and salt the earth where they fall. Let me go!"_

_The woman—who calls herself Dr. Valeri, but he knows good and goddamn well that the things she's done to him aren't in any book of good medical practice—smiles thinly and sympathetically down at him. "Now, Dean. Is that any way to behave? My goodness, such an angry boy. I wonder, Dean…what are you so angry about?"_

_"I'm angry that you think this Dr. Phil crap is doing anything to disguise what a fucking monster you are—and I_ kill _monsters, you bitch."_

_She holds up a finger. "Language, Dean." She pushes the plastic depressor back into the headgear thingie that holds him immobile, flattening his tongue to the floor of his mouth and then nods at the big goon standing at the switch. The goon turns a dial. What feels like a freight train of a million angry electric bees slams into Dean, lifting his spine into a curve, making his heels drum into the plastic and his shoulders snap back._

_It's longer this time; long enough that he starts blacking out, sounds fading and rising like the roar of the tide and the edges of everything turning soft and brittle. When Valeri nods again and the current stops, he can only pant in quiet whimpers that shame him._

_"We can go on like this," Valeri says. "Almost indefinitely, in fact. And not just as…easy as this."_

_He tries to glare at her. Easy? Fucking_ easy _? Is she kidding?_

 _One short but perfectly polished plum fingernail circles his navel, stirring the hairs ticklishly and making all the rest of him break out in gooseflesh. He flails against the restraints again, but he's too weak to do much more than flop helplessly as she traces the soft, sparse trail of hairs down. His belly shrinks away and his breath catches. Head tipped a little to one side, Valeri smiles gently as she grazes across his soft and shrinking cock._ Don't, _he thinks, frantic but still too prideful—and too gagged—to say the words aloud._ Please. Please don't. Don't touch me. Don't…

 _"It's not_ you _we want, Dean. I mean…certainly you've been entertaining in your own way…" She pets him now, like you would pet a kitten, soft short strokes. His dick remains stubbornly, steadfastly limp and for that he could almost cry his gratitude. "But there are a million others like you. The world is filled with food." Her smile turns lascivious; her tongue steals over her upper lip, pink against the old-blood color of her lipstick._

 _Then she nods at the goon again. There's the absurdly loud slam of the dial and returning current; then his world is only pain and that horrible, evil, sweet smile. Dean cries. He can't help it. He wonders if his heart will explode in his chest and if it does, if it'll then really be_ over _or whether he'll become the exact kind of revenant he's spent his life chasing down._

 _When the current dies, her fingers slip around his penis again, familiar and dirty. Dean closes his eyes, his breath sobbing in his lungs and his lashes so wet he can barely see anyway. He still feels it when she leans in, though, the floral lightness of her perfume surrounding them, the soft fleeting whisper of her breath. "This can be so simple, Dean. We only want him. Your brother. You're nothing to us in all of this; we have no reason to hurt you this way, once you've told us what we want to know. Tell me where he is,_ Dean _." Her tongue laps against his jaw, filthily warm, tasting his sweat, his tears. "Tell me where your brother is, Dean."_

***

It's not like the other memories that have come to him, smoothly snap-fitting into place. It's jagged and seems to sit at ninety degrees opposite everything else, abrading where it touches. Dean inhales, fighting not to drop Sam's limp body, fighting not to take the butt of his gun and smash Sam's face in until that voice—her voice—stops.

_Shut up, shut up, shut up! Or I'll make you shut up!_

_(smash your face in, make you bleed)_

Dean freezes. It's not his thought. Not him. Sam…he wouldn't hurt Sam. Can't.

Shooting Rube and the others was much easier than this; groping for a line of sanity through the darkness-ridden passages the Dreamer in the mine has carved into his brain with electricity and drugs. Fumbling for the thought that this _is_ only the creature, slinking stealthily in the unguarded corners of his mind.

_This is Sam. Sam my brother. My Sam._

Sam's eyes close and he whimpers, twisting sideways in Dean's grip and fisting his hands in his hair at either of his temples. Dean fights not to drop him.

"C'mon, Sam," Dean says, dragging Sam up. His bad shoulder aches and trembles. "C'mon. It's me. It's Dean. Fight that thing. Don't let it drag you down."

Sam doesn't say anything, but his arms come up to hang onto Dean's jacket at the collar and placket, clinging hard. Dean puts his arm around Sam's back and grabs onto Sam's belt and belt loop. "Hang on," Dean says and Sam makes a soft, pained noise but he nods, face half-hidden in Dean's shoulder.

Dean looks at his watch. They've got about two hours before the charges blow. "We're getting out of here," he tells Sam.

"No." Sam's voice is tiny but he drags his feet for emphasis. His grip on Dean's coat tightens. "We've got to finish it."

"Sam, you can barely walk."

A shudder runs though Sam's whole body. Then his grip on Dean shifts, using Dean's body to push himself upright. "I can make it," he says stubbornly.

"Sam—"

"Dean…" Sam's eyes look blown; he's punch-drunk and spacey. "It'll just keep getting stronger, keep coming after us. It'll keep killing. Like the demon."

Sam had told him about the demon that had killed their parents and almost killed them. It seems weird and worrisome that he can feel so…empty about it, when according to Sam, it's shaped almost everything about them. But at this moment, it seems a hell of a lot less important than getting Sam out of here alive and in one piece.

"I can make it," Sam says again and there's something in his eyes like pleading even as he wobbles unsteadily on his mile long legs. "Let's end this, Dean. This…this shouldn't happen to anyone else, what happened to you."

_Tell me where your brother is, Dean._

He'd like to believe that he didn't tell Valeri what she'd wanted to know; that he'd protected Sam and that's why Sam got away but he doesn't know. 

He doesn't know.

And now he might be taking Sam straight to it all over again.

"Sam," he says slowly. "This… This is a bad idea, man. I think we should go."

"We have to do this, Dean. We have to. It's…" Sam's shoulders slump. "Fuck. It's what we _do_."

"And if I get you killed in the process?" Dean demands. 

Sam shakes his head. "Dean— How are you going to do that?"

"What…what if this was its plan all along?" He hates admitting it, saying the words out loud where they can turn into anything. Where they can become the truth. "You said it yourself…you can do all these…things. You're 'special'. And not just in that 'rides the short bus' way. That thing had me for six weeks and I don't know fuckall what it did to me. What if I'm just like the rest of them? What if I led you here just for this? Just for it to get you?"

"Dean."

"Don't 'Dean' me, Sam. I'm amnesiac, not stupid! It almost got you right then, right there."

"But not because of _you_!" Sam's hand closes over Dean's arm, digging. "Dean, I'm okay. And you're okay. It's not…it's not in you like that."

"You don't know that," Dean insists.

"I'm the goddamn psychic here and I damn well do!" Sam shouts and then closes his eyes, swaying again as he presses his fist to his right eye. "Ow. Fuck. I…okay, _yes_ it attacked me just then, but I'm…I'm okay, Dean. I… It's trying to hurt me with secondhand pain; by showing me what it did to the others. The others like you."

Dean looks at Sam suspiciously. "The others like me or _me_?"

Sam shrugs. Even that little gesture seems to sap him. _This is_ stupid, Dean thinks. _This is crazy and dangerous and stupid._ "Both. I saw…" Sam reaches out and brushes his fingers over Dean's scalp, tracing the faded outline of an electrode burn. It tickles and Dean shies away. "I keep seeing little flashes of what she did to you. What _it_ did to you, through her. The ice and the drugs and the…machines. The…Jesus, the fucking 'Coffin'…"

"Don't," Dean says. His face feels hot and his stomach rumbles with cramp.

"You didn't tell her, Dean," Sam says. Dean's eyes dart at Sam and his fingers thrum restlessly on the gun's butt. Sam swallows. "I know they asked you about me. How to get to me. How to find me…"

"Don't," Dean says again, hoarser this time. And he thinks he remembers this too, hazier, delicate. Remembers the certainty of breaking, of more and more pain until he'd say anything, anything she wanted, just to make it stop. He remembers the leads going into his armpits, on his cock and balls, inside him… "Oh, fuck," Dean whispers and then he's falling and puking, Sam reaching out to catch him, awkwardly.

"You didn't tell her," Sam says again, rougher. "You…"

"I did it," Dean chokes. " _I_ did. I made myself forget. I knew… It was only a matter of time. I couldn't fight her." He hawks and spits, bile bitter, sour sweat standing out on his waxy skin. "I couldn't fight her. I'm sorry. Shit. I'm sorry, Sammy."

"Dean…you saved me," Sam says, like it's obvious. "You saved _us_ because they would have killed you if you'd kept fighting them or tried. You saved us both. You think I don't get that?"

 _"I did this to myself,"_ Dean insists. "I made myself forget you, Sam. I made myself forget…everything."

"To save me," Sam says again, shaking him a little. "To save me and save yourself. Because that's what you do, Dean. What you've always done. You protect me. And I need you to do it one more time." Sam nods towards the tunnel in front of them. "I gotta go, Dean. It'll chase us forever if I don't and a lot more people will die. People that don't deserve it. This whole town and beyond. I can't turn my back. And I can't do it by myself."

Dean understands now, Sam's whispered _I don't want you to go_. Physical threats they can deal with, something he understands, can handle. But this…these mental attacks. Dean can't defend Sam against that. He can't protect Sam then.

"I can handle the monster," Sam says, though Dean suspects he's faking more confidence than he actually feels, white lipped and still sort of shaking. "Just protect me. Protect my body."

Dean spits again. Still bitter against his tongue; he wishes for water. "Okay," he says, because there's no way in hell he's letting Sam walk in there alone.


	12. Wings of Steel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wind up your reasons  
> Demons and ghosts  
> Wind up your circuitry  
> Loves you the most  
> Your wings on fire  
> But you can't find them  
> Your wings are higher  
> I've never seen them before 
> 
> Chasing the wings of steel  
> Chasing the ghost of time 
> 
> Your wings are tired  
> You can not get there from here  
> Where you aspire  
> You can not fly there from here
> 
> In a river of darkness there is a light  
> "Wings of Steel" by Collide

Shortly, they come to the doors. 

Or…where doors once were, leaving only the giant carved lintel and the cracked jambs, all smutted and stained with smoke. The doors themselves are just beyond on the tunnel floor, twisted and blackened and covered in layers of gritty dust.

Dean's hands are shaking as he sets explosives on the inside of the left doorjamb. "So, let me get this straight," he says slowly, punching the numbers into the timer. "Let's say _you_ get some psych-urgent need to start tunneling down like you're trying to dig your way to China and then you come across some gargantuan set of 'abandon all hope ye who enter here' doors. Now maybe I'm missing the point, but that's when I start moving swiftly in the other direction."

"Pretty much," Sam agrees, busy with his own device. His jaw is tight, teeth clenched. Dean remembers how bad Sam was after moving the bottle; he wonders how much more Sam can take before he breaks, blind with pain.

"At what point does, 'oh, hey, _these_ look like they've been locked for a billion years; let's blow them up' sound like a _good_ plan?"

Sam's smile is wan, but he tries. "Oh, c'mon Dean…you're just mad you didn't get to blow them up first."

"Shut. The fuck. Up."

Somewhere—somewhere else—a voice screams, echoing off the rock. Not the 'oh help me I'm a damsel in a dress' kind; more the 'I'm so insanely furious I'm going to chew your face off' kind. Both their heads turn, tracking, and then they exchange a glance. "Sounds like reinforcements," Dean comments blandly.

"Sure does," Sam agrees.

"What do you think the odds are that there's a way out on the other side?" Dean asks.

"Don't know. Why?"

Dean checks his ammo again, compulsive (smart). "Because if we blow the doors _now_ , then they can only come at us from one direction."

"Yes," Sam agrees, "but that also means we can only get _out_ in the one direction."

"Better odds than fighting on two fronts," Dean points out. "I don't suppose you got some kind of…map along with all that information you picked up when you and the monster bumped auras or whatever you crazy kids call it."

Sam looks surprised, like it never occurred to him. Then his eyes flutter half-shut. "I don't….I think…"

"Sam!" Dean grates, urgent, as another scream comes echoing up the tunnel, deeper sounding, angrier.

"Okay…okay, yeah. I think…" Sam's arm comes up from his side like it's on a string and he points off in what Dean thinks is west-northwest. "About a mile from the hospital. We can get out that way."

"Great." Dean claps Sam's shoulder. "Let's blow some shit up."

"Oh, and Dean?"

"Yeah?"

"For the record? I don't 'bump auras' with anyone but— _ow_ —you, thank you kindly."

***

Dean's ready for it when Sam's knees buckle the next time. He's tried not to make it obvious, but with Sammy stumbling along like he is, Dean's been watching and sticking close and biding his time.

So when Sam starts to fall, Dean's there, shoving his arm under Sam's, holding him up, pulling him on. "Just…" Sam breathes and then whimpers, stifled and sick, "…just a little further."

The tunnel opens up around them suddenly, spilling them out into a vast cavern in which their lamps are like droplets of blood in a vast ocean—lost almost immediately. Dean's not sure what alerts him—a sense of movement, the scrape of something over stone—but it only takes that second's instinct for him to push Sam behind him, against the wall and fire into the dark. 

Headlamp and muzzle flash show two of them, rushing at them slaver-mouthed and claw-handed. Dean's shot hits the first one—a woman in the shredded remains of a sensible gray business suit—in the neck. His second shot is only a beat behind the first, but he doesn't have enough time to make it good and so it only— _only!_ —takes off a chunk of the jaw of the second in a messy explosion of pink meat and white bone. The third finishes the job.

"Sam?"

"Yeah." Sam taps his shoulder lightly, sounding breathless. "I'm good. Thanks."

"We're not out yet." Another noise, another instinctive shot in the dark. This one goes wide and too high—the boy is crouching, sidling up to them below eye level and he—it—actually gets its arms around Dean's knees, pushing him back into Sam. They both _oof_ and Dean fires straight down into the skull, half-deafened by the noise and its echoes. The puppet drops and Dean tries not to think about what's soaking into his coat and skin and jeans. "It's got to be here somewhere, right?"

"It is," Sam says with such stifled certainty it sends chills rippling down Dean's spine. "I… It's still trying to…to get in me. Dean…" His fingers close over Dean's shoulder again, tight and gripping. "If…if I fuck this up. If it gets me…"

"Don't," Dean says curtly. "M'not walking out of here without you."

There's a promise in there and he knows Sam hears it when Sam's fingers tighten. A moment later, Sam lets go and Dean hears the quiet purr of Sam's backpack. There's a hiss and then light explodes, blinding and sudden, next to Dean's head. He shies away before he realizes it's a flare, red-pink-white.

Sam flings it away, into the darkness and lights several more, until they're surrounded by a halo of blood-colored light. "It'll be in the center of the cave," Sam says. There's a muscle ticking in his jaw and his hair is flattened and curling with the sweat of the effort of holding the Dreamer out of his mind. He looks at Dean, his eyes very dark in this light, the pupils wide. "It's going to throw everything it's got at us."

Dean nods. "I'll cover you," he says.

Sam nods in return and puts his hand on Dean's shoulder, using Dean as a crutch as Dean reloads, listening for the next attack. 

"Sam?"

"Yeah?"

"Can I shoot left-handed too?"

Sam huffs a laugh. "Yeah, Dean. You're good."

"Cool." Dean brings out Sam's discarded gun from his belt. He feels a little more _solid_ with a gun in either hand. He wonders if Dr. Valeri is here, if he'll get to end her the way he's going put an end to as many of these puppet-humans as he can. He doesn't know if the thought is a joyful one or just fearful.

Things get a little blurry after that.

***

There comes a time when you can't think too much.

When there's only body after body coming at you, all of them bent on tearing you and your brother into tiny bloody pieces. If you're lucky. 

There's a time when it all narrows and refines to target and shoot, sight, target and shoot, reload. Dean doesn't remember being good at this; he has no recollection of anything other than being good at it now, the bullets moving like extensions of his thought. He looks, he moves and they go, piercing flesh and bone, leaving it a twitching, flopping ruin on the stone. 

God, there are so many of them.

His nose burns with the cordite of the gun, the swamp-wet reek of blood and other bodily fluids and the chemical stink of the flares.

Sam's hand is on his shoulder (still on his shoulder) light and flexible as Dean has to step and pivot and move to fire. Sam mutters under his breath, English in parts and other languages

But at some point, he becomes aware there are too many of them, like the whole town has come to the defense of this nameless _thing_ that's warped and fed off of them for it's own purposes. It makes him angrier and he stops trying to make out faces, just putting them down as fast as he can.

"Sam," he says, reloading. He tries not to think about how few clips he has left. "You need to hurry…"

Sam squeezes and taps to show he's heard. He tugs and Dean lets Sam's grip on his shoulder steer them across the cave floor, Sam leaving a trail of flares like breadcrumbs.

Three more.

Then five right behind them, one a little girl.

_They took me down into the dark._

Can't think about it. Can't think about it.

They're not human anymore. Not really. Sam said so, and Dean believes him.

Not human. Not human.

His right clip runs out and he doesn't have time to reload it or bring it back to bear before something crashes into him on that side, tearing him away from Sam and bowling him across the stone. "Sam!"

Other hands seize onto his wrists, bang the left against the rock until his fingers let go and the gun clatters away.

"Sam!"

He promised. He promised to protect Sam.

Fighting then. The taste of blood and skin and other things he doesn't want to think about in his mouth, other nameless things under his fingernails, the crunch of bone under his boot heels. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. He promised and there isn't much time.

So many of them. Every time he fights his way clear of one—or a few—there's another to take its place, forcing him down again, spread-eagle against cold stone. 

"Sam! Sam!"

_"Dean!"_

Dean doesn't know how to describe what happens next. 

Sam shouts Dean's name—loud, despairing—and then suddenly there's a _shockwave_ , concussive pressure and force and light like a nuclear blast. 

Against it, he can see Sam, silhouetted to only a black cutout shape, hands fisted in his hair. And then the screaming starts. Dean's eyes jerk away from Sam to look at his attackers, all in mirrors of Sam's pose, eyes shut or staring widely, hands clutched to their heads.

Dean doesn't understand until finally, somewhere deep in his own mind, he feels a second light, actinic and huge flare in his own mind, burning away the clotted layers of darkness and scourging him with fire. Dean screams and flies up, out and into the light.

***

Waking up seems to take a very long time. Reports are coming in from the outlying regions of his body sluggishly and in broken fragments that don't seem to make a lot of sense on their own: cold, hurt, stiff. Pressure on his chest; another person. Smell tells him _Sam_ in bursts of sweat and shampoo and skin. Something under his hip, pain.

Dean brings up one hand to sweep under him, dislodging something metal—he thinks one of his guns—while the other comes to press Sam's body into his. Sam is warm, breathing. Dean cups the sweat-damp back of Sam's neck, soft hair brushing over his knuckles, and breathes out a thank you to whomever or whatever might be listening.

Dean listens, stupid and slow and realizes that the breath he hears isn't only his and Sam's. Dean opens his eyes and it's dark, the colors of his eyes the only illumination and useless. He lets himself lie a moment longer, memory—the Dreamer in the Dark, the mine, Valeri and the hospital—washing into him gradually. Then he shakes Sam lightly.

Sam twitches and makes a soft noise of protest, scrubbing his cheek hard against Dean's chest, arm tightening around Dean's left side.

Dean shakes him again. "Sam."

"No…" Sam breathes.

Dean squeezes gently, then starts to curl up, forcing Sam to move too. Sam growls, but eventually he sits back on his heels, his fingers still tucked in the front of Dean's coat.

"You okay?" Sam asks.

"What happened?" He hears Sam fumbling in his pack, the crackle of paper and looks away before Sam lights the flare. In the explosion of light, Dean can see they're lying in a tangle of bodies. Some are obviously dead, twisted in shapes no one living makes. Others are less certain, and Dean crabs his hand sideways, reaching for his gun.

Sam puts his hand over Dean's, stopping him and Dean turns his head to look at Sam. "Don't," Sam says. "They…they're not dangerous anymore."

"They're not?"

"No. It—the thing—it's dead. Most of the shells are dead too."

"Dead?" Dean repeats. 

"Yeah." Sam's fingers quake just a little; Dean doesn't think Sam even notices it, his face turned so all Dean can see is hair and the jut of his jaw. He sounds…ashamed. "I killed it. I…physically, it was very…weak. That's why it fought the way it did—with illusions and…and shells." 

It's the second time he's said that. "Shells?"

Sam's thumb strokes over the back of Dean's hand, reassuring. Dean wonders who's being reassured here. "The people it had possessed. That's how it thought of them. Shells it had…hollowed out to make room for itself."

"Then why aren't they all dead?"

"Because not all of them were possessed to the same degree. The more the creature had them, the more _of_ them it had, the less of _them_ there was to come back when it died."

"And the charges?" 

"Went off a while ago." Sam looks off in the direction he'd pointed out the tunnel before. "We can still get out through the tunnels by the hospital, though." He tilts his head as his gaze comes back. Dean doesn't know how to read his eyes in this flickering half-light. Isn't real good at reading Sam's expressions at the best of times. "Do you…do you remember anything?"

Oh. 

"No," Dean answers and looks away.

Sam takes a breath and his fingers creep up to brush over Dean's neck, his jaw, making him shiver. "It'll come," he says.

"Yeah. Hey, we should get out of here." His mouth feels like something died in it; he turns his head and spits.

"We've got to get these people out of here," Sam says. "The survivors."

Dean nods. "Of course we do. And then we blow the cave?"

Sam's hand goes around the back of Dean's neck and massages. Dean lets himself lean towards Sam for a moment. "Yeah. Then we blow the cave."

***

The hospital is on fire.

Dean and Sam stand on the ridge above the facility with the rest of the survivors and a fair sprinkling of the hospital's patients shivering in dull teal scrubs. "Do you think she's down there?" Dean asks. He hadn't seen Dr. Valeri among the dead or the survivors they'd herded from the mine like dazed and painfully slow sheep.

Sam shrugs. "I don't know." He's still punch-drunk and sort of blown from the energy of _whatever_ it is he did down in the mine. He's hanging onto Dean and Dean guesses they look pretty stupid, but he also guesses it doesn't matter much and none of these folks are in much position to care if he's cuddling with his brother on the side of a mountain or not. "I doubt it. I don't… There wasn't much of her left, if anything."

"We should go check," Dean says. A couple feet below them, a man who looks old enough to be their Dad's age sits in the snow and cries, rocking back and forth and clutching himself. Dean wonders if it's because he remembers what he did when the Dreamer had him, or because there's so little of himself left and it aches.

"Yeah," Sam agrees and neither of them move.


	13. Downfall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wonder how you sleep   
> I wonder what you think - of me   
> If I could go back   
> Would you have ever been with me   
> I want you to be uneased   
> I want you to remember   
> I want you to believe in me   
> I want you on my side   
> Come on and lay it down   
> I've always been with you   
> Here and now   
> Give all that's within you   
> Be my savior   
> And I'll be your downfall  
> "Downfall" by Matchbox 20

"Dean?"

Sam's shivering a little in the circle of Dean's arm and Dean's feet are almost numb. He thinks they probably should really get moving when someone tugs at his off arm and says his name. When he turns, he realizes he knows her from the hospital, tall and rawboned and fuchsia with cold in her hospital scrubs. Her head's just been shaved; the razor lines stand out ugly and scabbed and her whole scalp looks raw and red. Once upon a time, she'd been frightened enough to grab and hold his hand and he'd been beaten for it and then locked in the Coffin for three days. It takes longer to remember her name—Amy.

"Hey," he says. "Amy."

She smiles and he sees a gap where she's lost a tooth, just since he's seen her last. She throws her arms around him next and Dean tries hard not to scratch her off him like a spider that's crawled down his neck. Instead, he sort of _encourages_ her to step off of him.

"What happened?" he asks.

"Oh," she says vaguely, rocking from foot to foot and scratching the back of her shoulder. "Dr. Valeri put the ward on lockdown. She was pissed." Amy flinches and puts her hand over her mouth. "I mean, she was unhappy."

"It's okay," Sam says, reassuring.

Amy laughs nervously and tunelessly, looking everywhere but at them. He remembers that—remembers it about _himself_ —and shivers, arm flexing a little around Sam's waist. Sam's arm tightens in return. "Anyway, she left. They all left, pretty much." She gnaws on her knuckle. "And it was Franz that started it. I wasn't even there. I was somewhere else. It wasn't me. I was out. I was with my friends James and Lily. We had tea with cream and ginger snaps."

Sam looks at Dean curiously and Dean whirls one finger around his temple: _crazy_. "What did Franz start?" Dean asks.

Amy stamps a foot in the snow and he realizes she's barefoot. Of course she is; no shoes allowed in the ward. " _You_ know," she says in unnerving echo of the ghost from the cabin. "He and Mumbling Dave did it. They were angry too. The fire's real pretty, though, right?"

"Yeah," Dean says, heartfelt and Sam squeezes again. It hurts a little and Dean realizes that underneath the numbness he hurts. Kind of a lot.

"I brought this for you," Amy says and lunges at him in this awkward thresh of limbs that makes him backpedal and step on Sam's toe. But Amy only grabs his hand and thrusts her fingers at him, depositing something small and metal on his palm, warm from the heat of her skin. "I remembered it was yours. It's pretty too."

She beams at him, proud of herself, and Dean looks down to see a silver ring. He looks at Sam who nods and takes it from him, slipping it on Dean's right ring finger. It snags a little on his enlarged knuckle, but not much, and when it's snugged down, it feels right. 

He turns back to Amy, to thank her, but she's already bounding down the hill, whooping like a kid and throwing her arms up in the air. He wonders if she belongs here, in Asher's Grove, and whether she has any family left or whether she—like him—was just somebody passing through, convenient and disposable.

He wonders what she'll do now. What any of them will.

The police haven't come. Neither has the fire department. He wonders who's left, to pick up the pieces now that it's finished. 

Dean shivers and turns back to Sam, turning the ring on his finger with his thumb. Then a thought occurs to him.

"Dude," he says, eyeing Sam sidelong, "was that a proposal or something?"

Sam's face breaks out into his huge happy grin. "You wish," he says and punches Dean in the arm.

Ow.

***

Sam keeps suggesting that they leave—more often as the cold deepens and the light gets worse while the sun starts its downward arc—but Dean can't go. Not yet. Not until he sees her. Not until he knows.

They end up hiking almost all the way back up to the cave before Dean finds her in a clump of evergreen bushes, twisted and tiny and dead. He doesn't feel anything, looking down at her. No sense of satisfaction, no sense of revenge or even justice.

Nothing.

She bled from her eyes, ears and nose, making a mask of dried gore. Her face is surprisingly peaceful under it. It doesn't look like she hurt. He doesn't know if that's a relief or makes him sorry.

He wonders how the thing in the mine got to her in the first place. When. He's seen all the degrees in her office, the pictures of her with friends and family. She'd been human once. They all had, the people he'd killed today.

Killed without a second thought or a moment's qualm, because Sam had been in his charge and Dean had promised to protect him. His chest feels tight and even though his hands are empty, he thinks he can still feel the crosshatched grips of the guns against his palms like scars.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to feel," he says, when Sam comes tramping up to him and stands next to and just behind him, shoulders jostling.

"I don't know either, Dean," Sam says. He rests his chin on Dean's shoulder.

They stand there a while longer, shoulders hunched against the wind before Sam tugs on Dean's sleeve. "C'mon. Let's get out of here." He bumps Dean in the shoulder again. 

Dean nods. He spits once, blood flecked, in the snow near the corpse and then lets Sam lead him down the hill by the light of the burning asylum.

***

Dean washes his hands in the snow when they get back to the car. Face too, the cold burning against his skin. The jacket's a total loss and even though the cold is brutal, he takes it off and leaves it. It's nothing he wants to take with him.

He takes the keys from Sam's limp, tired fingers. Sam nods tiredly and goes around to the passenger side. Dean discovers that driving is another thing that's mostly muscle memory and that the driver's side seat feels a lot more comfortable under his ass.

Sam doesn't talk on the way back to the cabin, head leaned back against the headrest and his eyes wide open. The nervous energy that carried Sam through the mine, the ordeal with the Dreamer and the long search for Valeri's body (he feels guilty about that now, way to go, Dean-o) seems to have died out of him, leaving Sam shrunken and burnt out, oddly small as he hunches, knees knocking on the glove box.

And Dean can feel it coming.

Sam slams the Impala door back at the cabin, which makes Dean wince, but he just follows Sam into the cabin. He can taste it, like lightning before the storm. He thinks there should be something he can say, that he should know Sam well enough to know how to make this better, but he doesn't. 

He might never know.

Inside, in the bedroom, Sam chucks his backpack into the corner, sits down and starts to unlace his boots.

Dean remains standing, tapping his fingertips on the table, looking down at his bloodied, filthy knuckles. Only so much you can do with snow, after all. Sam kicks his boots aside and attacks his belt next. It's horrible, Dean thinks, that he feels almost jealous of the people that were in thrall to the thing in the mine; freed, they get to be more-or-less whole again. They are themselves while he and Amy and all their other victims are still only shattered, empty slates. He supposes he's lucky that he only lost his memory and not his mind. He's lucky to have Sam.

For however long _that_ lasts.

Dean closes his eyes and tries not to think about it. Sam won't leave him _here_ ; that's good enough for now. It has to be.

"You thought I'd get my memory back, didn't you?" Dean asks suddenly, eyes opening again. He smudges an old paint spot on the wood with the toe of his sneaker—Sam's sneaker. "If we killed it. You thought it would come back to me."

Sam freezes, his hands on his knees, head down. "Give it time. It still could come back," he says finally, not looking up. "It'll come back."

"And some things _are_ coming back. But not everything. It may never all come back. That's not the point. The point is, you thought it," Dean persists.

All at once, Sam slings his belt across the room in a vicious underhand throw. It hits the wood and the metal leaves a small scar, bright against the wood. "Yeah, Dean, what? I thought it, okay?" His head comes up, his expression angry and troubled.

"Okay." Dean shrugs. He'd just wanted Sam to say it.

Sam sort of chokes and looks at Dean incredulously. "Okay?" And suddenly Dean can tell. This is when. _"Okay?"_

Dean crosses the room fast and grabs two handfuls of Sam's shirt just as Sam starts breaking, just like Dean knew he'd eventually have to. Sam shakes in Dean's grip, trying to bow in half. "It's not okay," Sam insists, seizing Dean's shirt in his fingers in turn. "It's not okay, Dean. It's not _okay_. I just… I just want my brother back. I want my brother." His eyes are lunatic, huge and wild staring at Dean as if he can bring the other Dean, _his_ Dean to the surface with the pull of his mind. "I want… I want you…all of you… _Fuck._ " Sam bows his head, choking on it after holding on for so long. "I'm sorry, I'm _sorry_ …"

Dean shakes his head. "No, it's okay, Sam, it's okay," he murmurs again and again. "I get it, Sammy; it's okay, shhh, shhhh…"

"It's not okay," Sam insists again. But it's only a moment before Sam's teeth are in his throat and his sustained "I want you, I want _you_ ," resonates up Dean's own vocal cords like the words are his own. Dean's fingers slip under the hem of Sam's shirt, finding first the taut and trembling skin of Sam's stomach and then the warm muscle of his pectoral, where he can feel Sam's heart throb too fast against his palm.

"Here," Dean says softly, letting Sam bend his head back and chew on the skin of his neck, letting Sam do whatever he wants. "I'm here."

"I'm sorry," Sam whispers, wretched, even as he pushes the shirt from Dean's shoulders, slides his thumbs under the short sleeves of Dean's tee to trace the underside of Dean's biceps to his armpits. Goosebumps break out on Dean's skin. "I'm so sorry…"

"Don't," Dean answers. "It's… Don't be sorry." He doesn't know what else to say. He strips Sam out of his shirt, curves his fingers around Sam's waist and up Sam's spine. Sam's teeth close hard on Dean's skin as he moans and _Jesus_ it hurts but Dean doesn't pull away, doesn't do anything other than give into it, roaming Sam's skin with his own. 

_I love you. I… I just love you, Dean._

It's good enough. It has to be.

Sam's still shaking but Dean thinks it's for other reasons now. _Because_ they're alive, because it's over and they're here, together. Sam's cock is warm and full in his hand and Sam's mouth is still stammering apologies into his and now it's really done. Really really done and tomorrow, they'll move on and this is what is left.

This is what is left:

Sam and Dean.

Dean and Sam.

"Don't be sorry," Dean says again, tugging Sam down, off the chair, into his lap, into his arms. He tugs at Sam's hair, bites Sam's lip and chin and jaw and neck until Sam's too-bright eyes close and his body arcs into Dean's.

_I'm here. I'm here._

"Dean…" Sam's mouth makes new patterns of bruises over the ones from today, renewing the ones he left before, marking Dean as his again. They ride and thrust against each other, slow at first and then faster, harder, more urgent, tiredness sloughing away against the bigger need to do this, _be_ this, reaffirm this. 

Dean and Sam.

Sam and Dean.

Dean thinks he remembers this too. Violence begets violence. 

Sometimes things end with a bang.

Sometimes they start with one.


	14. Coda

Dean's tired, doesn't remember ever feeling so tired…although that's not saying much. Sam's already asleep, face buried in Dean's shoulder and busily drooling. Dean wants to sleep but he can't, fingers continuing their idle slide over Sam's naked back, feeling him breathe, feeling his heart beat.

 _I want my brother back,_ Sam had said. And then, a moment later, _I want you._

 

_He thought Sam would want to fuck him, bury himself inside of Dean, but instead he'd turned and offered himself on hands and knees asking "Please. Please, Dean. Please fuck me."_

_"Shhh," Dean said and drew Sam down, onto him, wrapping his arms around Sam's chest. Sam's breath caught like a sob and his back arched—not in protest—but he worked himself down, gripping Dean's thighs roughly._

_"Dean," Sam whispers in between his moans and whimpers, shoulder blades digging into Dean's skin. "God, Dean…"_

 

Dean. It's his name. And he knows it because Sam tells him so, because he can hear it in the hundred different tones of Sam's voice, because he can _almost_ remember it. Just as there are a hundred other things he can almost remember, like all his memories are just on the other side of this gauze curtain that he can't quite find the opening of.

Tomorrow they'll leave and go back to what Sam tells him is their life—cheap motels and cheaper diners, guns and knives and more ghosts and monsters than you can shake a stick at. Evils like the one that did this to him, evils like the one that murdered their family and left them with no one and nothing but each other.

 

_"Harder," Sam gasped as his fingers dug into Dean's thigh. "God, Dean, harder."_

_"No." Dean flattened his hand between Sam's pectorals. Sam's heartbeat was erratic, wild. His other hand cupped Sam, not stroking. "No, like this. Like this."_

_Sam choked and moaned and twisted his body down on Dean's cock, tightening inside himself until Dean could barely move, held deep within Sam's body. "Dean—"_

_Sam feels guilty. Sam feels bad. And although he will do anything for Sam, he won't let Sam punish himself on Dean's dick._

_"No," Dean said again, tilting Sam back more, forcing him to go with Dean's rhythm, slow, steady, deep. "Like this, Sammy. You and me. Slow. I won't hurt you, little brother. Go slow."_

_Sam cried out and his hips jerked hard as he came into Dean's hand._

 

They could've died today. And very soon—possibly as soon as tomorrow or the next day—they're going to do it again. Sam snuffles and twitches in his sleep, smearing drool across Dean's shoulder. Dean grimaces a little but doesn't stop petting Sam's back. Sam wriggles closer, hot and slightly damp, easing his leg over Dean's.

All he has is Sam and a half-interest in a car and a bunch of weapons. That doesn't seem like very much. But in the last several days, it's also been enough to fill up his whole world.

Dean stares up at the ceiling and thinks about Sam. When he closes his eyes, though, all he can see is Dr. Valeri all shriveled up and dead in the snow. Their father's journal is filled with things like her…or the monster that had stood behind her, the inhuman thing that ate humans like he'd eat a Snickers bar.

It would have eaten the whole town; spread itself further like some horrible contagion and no one would have stopped it. How many of the townsfolk had been caught simply because they didn't believe that something like the Dreamer in the mine could exist? 

Someday, he and Sam will die. Maybe as soon as tomorrow, maybe in some fantastical old age he can't even contemplate. But the monsters will still be there. And people will still be walking blindly, unaware they even exist.

 

_Dean ached as he pulled out of Sam, unsatisfied. Sam eased off to the side and Dean laid back and they sprawled next to each other on the dirty, freezing-ass floor, panting hard and sweating._

_"Hey," Sam said after several moments, noticing Dean still curving up toward his belly. His hand crept up to encircle Dean's cock._

_Dean closed his hand over Sam's wrist. "It's okay, Sam. I don't need… I don't need it."_

_Sam looked at him, his eyes mostly brown in the half-light. There was a bruise on his forehead, right up at his hairline where Dean couldn't see it until now. "I want to," he said and started to stroke, even though Dean was filthy and wet. "Please? Let me?"_

_Sam's hand twisted just_ so _at the end of the slide, hard and rough and way too much and Dean's head fell back and knocked into the wood with a thump._

_"You okay?"_

_"Yeah," Dean said, starting to pant as Sam stroke-twisted again. "Yeah, okay. Just…go."_

_Sam draped over him, hot and lithe, and ran his tongue over Dean's lips. Dean's lids started to droop, but he made his eyes stay open, made himself look, Sam's face blurry and too close. He put his hand around Sam's forearm and felt the muscles flex and release with every movement._ Sam _, he tried to say, but it only comes out a moan through tangled tongues._

 __Sam, _he tried to say as he came. Sam's hand spread Dean's spend over his stomach, his hips and then he bent to lick it all away again._

_"You and me, Dean," Sam said after, coming to bite and nuzzle messily at Dean's mouth again. "You have to promise. You and me."_

_Dean looked at him, surprised he had to ask. At the same time, some tight band of pressure in his chest eased and his next breath felt clear and sharp in a way none of the others had been. "Yeah, Sam. Long as you want."_

_"Promise, Dean. Say it."_

_"Yeah Sam," he said again and craned up to that wide spit-wet mouth. "You and me; I promise."_

 

Someday they won't be able to do this anymore.

But someone will need to.

 _There's got to be another way,_ Dean thinks, cloudy, as he finally tips over the edge and into sleep.


End file.
